The title names the problem this essay seeks to open rather than close. Capital without Liberalism does not suggest that capital would become harmless, although it could, once separated from Western liberal ideology, nor that it possesses a fixed moral essence of its own. It asks what becomes visible when capital is no longer assumed to belong naturally to liberalism, the market, possessive individualism, or the Western narrative of modernity.

 

 China matters here because it forces this separation into historical view: capital remains powerful and productive, but its effects depend on the agents who mobilize it, the political and social ends that orient its use, and the civilizational grammar within which it is governed. Used for individualistic accumulation and zero-sum competition, capital generates domination; directed toward collective improvement, higher living standards, and mutual benefit, it can become socially beneficial. The question, then, is not whether China is simply capitalist or socialist, but whether capital can be directed outside liberalism without reproducing domination under another name.

 

 

The Problem

The argument therefore begins with a simple but often obscured distinction: economy, capital, and capitalism are not the same thing. Without that distinction, China is forced too quickly into inherited categories—capitalist, socialist, state capitalist, or post-socialist—before the historical novelty of its formation can be understood. The task is not to classify China in advance, but to clarify the terms through which the question itself has been posed.

 

In a previous newsletter, Reconsidering Capital, I began by distinguishing economy as the organization of material life, capital as accumulated human creation, and capitalism as the historical system in which accumulation becomes dominant [1]. That distinction matters because Western frameworks often collapse capital into capitalism and capitalism into liberal modernity. By obscuring these differences, they conceal the colonial power through which capitalism became world-historical and weaken the possibility of decolonial delinking.

 

This essay takes that distinction further by asking what happens when capital no longer appears only in liberal form. China makes the question unavoidable. If capital is not identical with capitalism, and if capitalism has historically been bound to mercantile and liberal and colonial forms of power, then China’s contemporary transformation cannot be understood by asking whether it fits an inherited ideological category. The better entry point is more polemical: who directs capital, toward what ends, under what limits, and through what civilizational grammar?

 

My argument here also revises the decolonial argument advanced in The Third Nomos of the Earth: The Decline of Western Hegemony and the Continuity of Capitalism [2], by bringing Marx’s account of capital [3] and Walter Mignolo’s distinction between dewesternization and decoloniality [4] into the same frame. There I argued that the transition toward a polycentric or multipolar world does not mean the end of the global economic status quo.

 

Here I sharpen that claim: the decline of Western hegemony does not end capitalism, but it does displace liberalism’s monopoly over the meaning and management of capital. In the dewesternizing formations of China, Russia, India, BRICS, and beyond, capital escapes the exclusive administration of Western civilization. China matters most because it does more than adopt capital; it translates capital through a non-Western political-civilizational grammar that draws on socialism, party-state sovereignty, Confucian ethical order, and the long history of Chinese civilization. This is what makes Western categories increasingly inadequate to the historical experience now before us.

 

The Wrong Question

The argument about China too often begins with the wrong question: is China capitalist or socialist? Chinese official discourse speaks of “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” while critics and observers often counter with “capitalism with Chinese characteristics” or “state capitalism.” These competing phrases signal that the inherited vocabulary is already under strain. The conventional question assumes that capitalism and socialism are stable categories whose meanings were settled in Europe, the United States, or the Soviet Union, and that the task is simply to decide where China fits.

 

But China’s self-conceptualization tells another story. It suggests that our inherited vocabulary is no longer sufficient for the change of era I explored in another newsletter: not simply another change within the modern era of change inaugurated between 1500 and 2000, but a transformation of the conceptual framework through which we have learned to understand “reality.” The better question is therefore not whether China is capitalist or socialist in a new way, but whether capital can be governed without liberalism—and whether socialism itself becomes something other than what it was when it confronted liberalism. To make that question clear, we first need to separate capitalism from capital.

 

Here the usual debate must be broken open: capitalism is not the same as capital. Capitalism is a historical regime in which markets, private property, wage labor, competition, and accumulation come to organize social life. Capital is more elemental. In Marx’s formulation, capital is not simply money or machinery, but value in motion: value compelled to expand by organizing labor, production, exchange, and surplus [3]. Capitalism is what happens when capital becomes sovereign. But capital need not be ruled in liberal form. It can be directed, disciplined, subordinated, or redirected toward other social and political ends.

 

This is why “Capital Without Liberalism” cuts deeper than “Capitalism Without Liberalism.” The point is not to sort China into an old ideological cabinet, as if the available labels were still adequate to the historical mutation before us. The point is to ask who commands capital. China has markets, corporations, profits, wage labor, competition, inequality, and accumulation; denying this would be pointless. But the decisive question is whether these forces are sovereign.

 

 Liberalism answers yes by making the market the privileged mediator of social life and by granting capital a claim to autonomy from the state, society, and collective purpose. China answers otherwise. In the party-state formation, capital is powerful, indispensable, and dangerous—but it is not supposed to rule. It is supposed to be governed.

 

China therefore does not stand outside capital; it puts the question of capital on different political ground. It mobilizes capital at enormous scale—in high-speed rail, ports, industrial zones, digital platforms, green technologies, finance, logistics, urbanization, and global trade. These are not marginal ornaments; they are the material engines of China’s transformation. But their existence does not by itself prove capitalism, if by capitalism we mean the sovereignty of capital over society.

 

The polemical point is precisely this: with capital human beings can build railways, organize factories, fund technology, circulate through banks, and discipline labor without becoming the supreme political authority. In China, capital is expanded, courted, feared, punished, and redirected. It is used for national reconstruction, technological sovereignty, infrastructure, poverty reduction, social stability, and geopolitical repositioning. Whether this succeeds, and at what cost, remains unresolved. But the experiment is historically significant because it breaks liberalism’s claim that capital can only be modern when it is free to rule.

 

The inherited Cold War opposition between capitalism and socialism obscures this transformation. “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” should not be read only as a new socialist doctrine, nor as socialism for the twenty-first century; nor should “state capitalism” be allowed to exhaust the meaning of China’s political economy. Both phrases capture something, but both remain trapped in older categories. Nor is “post-Western” adequate, because the prefix post still keeps China inside the West’s unilinear time: first the West, then its aftermath. The stronger term is non-Western, and more precisely dewesternizing.

 

As I have argued, “dewesternization is not a geographic but a political concept” [4]: it names the effort of states and civilizations to consolidate power without obeying the dictates of Western institutions such as the United States, the European Union, the IMF, or the World Bank. China may therefore be composing a non-Western, dewesternizing formation in which socialist statecraft, market mechanisms, civilizational memory, developmental ambition, and capital accumulation are articulated together. It may not yet have a name adequate to its historical novelty.

 

Capital, Coloniality, and the Western Formation

To understand why this matters, we must recall the historical formation of Western capitalism. For Aníbal Quijano, modern capitalism did not emerge as a purely European achievement and then spread outward. It was born with the conquest and colonization of the Americas, the racial classification of humanity, the control of labor, the appropriation of land, and the constitution of a world market [5]. America became, in Quijano’s formulation, the first space of a new global power. Race and capital were not accidental companions; they were mutually constitutive axes of the modern/colonial world. Read alongside Carl Schmitt’s account of global order [6], this formation also shows that capitalism was never merely an economic arrangement but part of a wider spatial ordering of the world.

 

This is the meaning of the coloniality of power. Colonialism names particular historical administrations of conquest and rule. Coloniality names the deeper and more durable matrix that outlives formal colonialism: the ordering of economy, authority, knowledge, subjectivity, gender, race, and nature through Eurocentered power. Capitalism, in this view, is not merely an economic system. It is the economy of a broader civilizational project that made Europe, and later the West, appear as the center of history, reason, progress, and humanity.

 

That distinction also helps separate Western imperialism from earlier imperial formations. Rome, the Arab Caliphates, the Ottoman Sultanate, the Mughal Empire, and other empires conquered, taxed, extracted, administered, and expanded. But Western expansion after 1492 gradually organized the planet through Atlantic slavery, plantation economies, mining, colonial land seizure, racial labor regimes, the world market, and later industrial capitalism. It did not merely expand a dynasty or state; it produced a modern/colonial world-system.

 

China and the Dewesternization of Capital

China enters this history from another archive, not as a late student of Western capitalism or a mere survivor of Soviet communism. Its political economy is assembled from older repertoires of statecraft, bureaucracy, imperial administration, Confucian ethics, collective obligation, civilizational continuity, and anti-colonial sovereignty. Capital and socialism were not poured into an empty vessel; they were translated through a political-civilizational grammar that liberal categories cannot exhaust.

 

The sequence Mao–Deng is central. Mao’s revolution sought to end China’s semi-colonial subordination and reorganize society through socialist mobilization, sovereignty, and anti-imperial struggle. Deng’s reforms did not simply abandon socialism for capitalism; they reconfigured the relation between socialist state power and capitalist mechanisms. Markets, foreign investment, enterprise reform, and accumulation became instruments for national development rather than signs of surrender to Western liberalism.

 

“Confucius in the middle” is a suggestive way to name this difference, so long as it is not reduced to cultural essence but reactivated in its ethical, political, and gnoseological force. Confucius here stands for another genealogy of order: relationality, hierarchy, obligation, education, ethical cultivation, and the responsibility of rule. This differs from the liberal image of society as an aggregation of autonomous individuals whose freedom is secured by property and market exchange. China can therefore mobilize capital without fully accepting the liberal anthropology that usually accompanies Western capitalism and can orient the outcomes of capital toward the wellbeing of the population rather than toward the increasing wealth of personal billionaires and monopolistic companies.

 

This is not to idealize China or to turn its experiment into a new doctrine. Reoriented capital can still exploit labor, deepen inequality, damage ecologies, discipline populations, and reproduce domination under different premises. The point is not that China has escaped capital’s contradictions. The point is sharper: China shows that capital does not have to be governed by liberalism. Capital can be subordinated to a party-state, national reconstruction, technological sovereignty, social redistribution, or civilizational ambition. That possibility unsettles the Western story that markets, liberalism, and modernity naturally belong together.

 

Dewesternization is not Decoloniality

This is where my distinction between dewesternization and decoloniality becomes unavoidable [4]. Dewesternization does not mean delinking from the colonial matrix of power. It means that non-Western states and civilizations refuse the West’s exclusive claim to administer that matrix. They contest Western command over institutions, technologies, markets, infrastructures, financial systems, and geopolitical rules. China, in this sense, is not abolishing the matrix; it is forcing a more uncomfortable question: who is authorized to command it?

 

That is why dewesternization must not be mistaken for decolonial liberation. It can multiply the centers of command while leaving accumulation, extraction, technological rivalry, state hierarchy, and geopolitical competition intact. Its question is not necessarily, “how do we exit the colonial matrix of power?” but rather, “who has the right to direct it?” China can therefore weaken Western hegemony without interrupting capital as a world-historical logic.

 

The collapse of the Soviet Union clarifies this paradox. In the Western imagination of the 1990s, that collapse appeared as liberal capitalism’s final victory: the “end of history,” the triumph of the United States, neoliberal globalization, and the arrival of a unipolar world order. Yet that victory also generated the conditions of its own instability. Once the socialist bloc disappeared as a geopolitical counterweight, Westernization advanced with extraordinary speed; at the same time, other states, histories, and civilizational projects began to reposition themselves inside—and against—the global order it claimed to settle.

 

China’s rise, Russia’s reassertion, and the broader emergence of BRICS and related formations made clear that the unipolar moment was never permanent. The post-Soviet world opened the gates to Westernization, but it also opened the field of struggle against Western monopoly over world order. Liberal capitalism expanded as if it had no rival, yet its expansion intensified inequality, financial crises, wars of intervention, ecological devastation, and resentment against Western claims to universal authority. Multipolarity did not arrive from outside that history; it emerged from the contradictions of Western victory itself.

 

Multipolarity is therefore both a rupture and a limit. It ruptures the fantasy that one Western universal history should govern the planet. But it remains limited because a world with several centers can still reproduce exploitation, extraction, authoritarianism, inequality, and accumulation—only now under plural commands rather than a single hegemon. Dewesternization pluralizes control over the world order; decoloniality asks whether the order itself can be transformed.

 

Tianxia and the Question of Universality

Zhao Tingyang’s Tianxia proposal belongs to this dewesternizing struggle over universality [7]. It refuses the assumption that the Westphalian nation-state, sovereignty, territorial borders, and interstate competition provide the only grammar for world order. Instead of beginning with the state as the primary unit, Tianxia begins with the world as the primary horizon. The polemical force of the proposal lies here: the question is no longer how sovereign states manage conflict among themselves, but whether world order can be imagined from a relational horizon not authored by the West.

 

In this sense, Tianxia provincializes Western international relations theory. It does not accept that political imagination must derive from Hobbes, Locke, Kant, Hegel, liberalism, realism, or the Westphalian state system. It retrieves a Chinese archive—Tianxia, Confucian relationality, harmony, coexistence, and world-centered governance—as a resource for thinking otherwise. It is parallel to China’s state rise, but not identical with state policy: it is a philosophical intervention in the global struggle over who may define universality.

 

Whether Tianxia can become decolonial depends on whether it delinks from the colonial matrix of power or merely replaces one universality with another. It may become decolonial if it unsettles the nation-state, possessive individualism, Eurocentric universality, and the assumption that world order must be organized through competition among sovereign units. But it remains limited if “all under heaven” becomes a civilizational claim that installs China as the privileged interpreter of the world.

 

A genuinely decolonial Tianxia would therefore have to refuse the temptation of a new imperial cosmology. It would need to affirm pluriversality: many worlds, many histories, many epistemologies, and many forms of political life coexisting without being reduced to one center. Its promise lies in thinking from the world rather than from the nation-state; its danger lies in turning the world into a single civilizational vision.

 

Beyond Socialism and Capitalism

The question of whether China offers socialism for the twenty-first century is important, but it still risks imprisoning the problem inside the ideological architecture of Western modernity. Capitalism and socialism are usually staged as opposites, yet both were shaped within the same modern horizon: industrialization, the state, progress, production, historical stages, and the struggle over who organizes labor, property, and accumulation. China may not be offering a new model of socialism or capitalism. It may be composing a political-economic formation that exceeds the terms by which both were historically named.

 

This is where dewesternization becomes decisive. Dewesternization is not conservatism. Conservatism is often treated as the third option inside the Western ideological box: if one refuses liberal capitalism and refuses socialism, one is presumed to fall back into tradition, hierarchy, reaction, or cultural restoration. But that framing still lets the West define the menu of historical possibility. Dewesternization points elsewhere. It does not merely conserve the past or restore an older order; it challenges the West’s authority to define the entire field of political imagination.

 

In that sense, dewesternization breaks both the capitalism/socialism binary and the conservative trap. It does not ask whether the future should belong to markets, the party-state, or a return to inherited tradition. It asks why these are assumed to be the only choices. It names the displacement of Western modernity as the sole horizon of theory, economy, and world order. The issue is no longer choosing among the ideologies produced inside the Western modern box; the issue is opening the possibility of other historical grammars.

 

This is why “socialism with Chinese characteristics” should be treated as a provisional name rather than a settled concept. It points to a formation that inherits elements of twentieth-century socialism—party rule, state ownership, planning, class discourse, and anti-imperial sovereignty—while exceeding that inheritance through market experimentation, global trade, technological transformation, infrastructure, finance, and long-term civilizational repositioning. The phrase names a tension more than a completed system.

 

Nor can China be reduced to capitalism in the Western liberal or neoliberal sense. Capital accumulation exists, markets exist, profit exists, inequality exists, and capitalist contradictions exist. But these forces are governed within a party-state project that seeks to subordinate them to collective stability, technological sovereignty, poverty reduction, infrastructure, and national rejuvenation. The result is not the abolition of capital; neither is it a liberal-capitalist order.

 

The absence of an adequate name is therefore not a weakness of the argument; it is the theoretical fact to be explained.Perhaps China is not a model to be copied, but a symptom of a larger transition: the exhaustion of Western categories through which the modern/colonial world has been understood. “State capitalism” names one dimension, but it reduces novelty to an old vocabulary. “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” names another but remains tied to a party-state self-description. “Dewesternization” is stronger because it names the movement beyond the Western ideological field itself—beyond liberal capitalism, beyond twentieth-century socialism, and beyond conservatism as the supposed third alternative.

 

China’s significance lies less in providing “the path” than in revealing that other historical grammars become thinkable once the West is no longer the unquestioned center of theory, economy, and world order. Its dewesternization may delink from liberal capitalism and from Soviet-style state communism, but it does not yet necessarily delink from accumulation, hierarchy, extraction, or the colonial matrix of power. The question remains open: can a dewesternizing political economy govern capital without reproducing domination under another name?

 

The Wager

This is the wager of “Capital Without Liberalism”: China has not solved the problem of capital, and it should not be made into a doctrine. Its importance lies elsewhere. China makes visible the separation liberal ideology tried to conceal capital and liberalism are not identical. Liberalism presented itself as the natural political form of capital; neoliberalism radicalized that claim by elevating the market into the highest rationality of social life. China’s rise interrupts that story.

 

Once that separation is visible, the political question changes. We are no longer asking only whether a country is capitalist or socialist, as if those inherited names exhausted the field of possibility. We are asking who directs capital, toward what ends, under what limits, and with what consequences for life, labor, nature, knowledge, and plurality. That question is larger than China. China is the most powerful contemporary site where it can no longer be avoided.

 

The future will not be decided by a return to Western liberal capitalism, nor by a restoration of twentieth-century state socialism. It will be decided by whether societies can reorient capital without allowing it to become sovereign, and whether dewesternization can move beyond the redistribution of command toward a genuinely decolonial pluriverse. China does not answer that question once and for all. Its force is more unsettling: it exposes the historical novelty of the problem itself.

 

The initial distinction therefore returns with greater force. Capitalism is not simply the presence of capital; it is the historical regime in which capital becomes sovereign and organizes society according to its own expansive logic. China’s experiment matters because it separates those terms without resolving their contradictions. It shows that capital can be mobilized outside liberal capitalism, but not that the management of capital has ceased to be dangerous. The question China forces upon the present is therefore not whether capitalism has ended, but whether capital can be governed without becoming, once again, the sovereign grammar of the world.

 

References

[1] Mignolo, Walter D. “Reconsidering Capital.” Lo de Walter. Buttondown, May 4, 2026. https://buttondown.com/lodewalter.

 

[2] Mignolo, Walter D. “The Third Nomos of the Earth: The Decline of Western Hegemony and the Continuity of Capitalism.” In Knowledge Production and Epistemic Decolonization at the End of Pax Americana, edited by Naoki Sakai and Jon Solomon, 87–110. London: Routledge, 2023. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003036661-3/third-nomos-earth-walter-mignolo.

 

[3] Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin Classics, 1976. Penguin Random House, https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/261069/capital-by-karl-marx-translated-by-ben-fowkes-introduction-by-ernest-mandel/. For a legal open-access English text, see Capital, Volume I, translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling and edited by Friedrich Engels, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/.

 

[4] Mignolo, Walter D. “Delinking, Decoloniality, and Dewesternization: Interview with Walter Mignolo (Part II).” Critical Legal Thinking, May 2, 2012. https://criticallegalthinking.com/2012/05/02/delinking-decoloniality-dewesternization-interview-with-walter-mignolo-part-ii/.

 

[5] Quijano, Aníbal. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.” Nepantla: Views from South 1, no. 3 (2000): 533–580. https://www.decolonialtranslation.com/english/quijano-coloniality-of-power.pdf.

 

[6] Schmitt, Carl. The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum. Translated and annotated by G. L. Ulmen. New York: Telos Press, 2003. https://www.telospress.com/store/The-Nomos-of-the-Earth-paperback-p17898060.

 

[7] Zhao, Tingyang. All Under Heaven: The Tianxia System for a Possible World Order. Translated by Joseph E. Harroff. Oakland: University of California Press, 2021. https://www.ucpress.edu/books/all-under-heaven/paper.