An old friend—literally, from my high-school years in Corral de Bustos—often travels to New York. From time to time, he comes to North Carolina and spends a couple of days with us. He likes the Triangle, a small Silicon Valley anchored by three universities at its vertices: North Carolina State University in Raleigh, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Duke University in Durham. I live on the outskirts of Chapel Hill, less than halfway to Hillsborough, a small town with a long memory of the Civil War. Along its streets, marble inscriptions on pedestals record dates, events, and the names of people involved in that history.

The day after he arrived, we decided to have an Argentine asado and enjoy one of those Carolina blue-sky days. As we chatted around the grill, drank a premium Malbec, and waited for the sausages and kidneys to cook slowly, he brought up “Capital Without Liberalism,” the newsletter he had read before visiting. He asked whether I had imagined a sequel—something like Capital Without Socialism. I had, but not seriously; it was still a floating idea. He went inside, returned with a notebook and pencil, and drew this equation:

Capital + Liberalism = Capitalism

Capital + Socialism = Capitalism

The road had been traced. We interrupted the conversation when our guests arrived and the family was joining the group, but resumed it that evening. I told him he had convinced me and that I would write the sequel, beginning with our exchange. He asked me not to use his name. I agreed. So, rather than refer to him only as “he,” I will call my friend May Gobelins.

 

I. From Capital Without Liberalism to Capital Without Socialism

This op-ed picks up where my earlier Lo de Walter essay, Capital Without Liberalism: Decoupling Capital from the Western Political Imaginary, left off [1]. There I distinguished economy, capital, and capitalism. Economy names the organization of material life. Capital names accumulated human creation. Capitalism names the historical system in which accumulation becomes dominant. China helped me separate capital from its presumed bond with liberal markets, possessive individualism, and Western modernity. Instead of asking whether China is capitalist or socialist, I asked who directs capital, toward which ends, under which limits, and within which civilizational grammar. Here I take the next step: can Capital also be disentangled from socialism?

Can Capital exist without socialism? I believe it can. Capital is not the same as socialism—or liberalism. I understand Capital as a social relation organized around accumulation. Liberalism and socialism are different political languages and institutional arrangements for directing and legitimating it. I will develop this argument in three steps: first by defining Capital, then by tracing its European and colonial histories, and finally by turning to China, where Capital operates without political liberalism and Marxism no longer belongs exclusively to the West.

 

II. What Is Capital?

The distinction between Capital and capitalism is the starting point. Capital is not the same as capitalism. Capital refers to the organization of land, labor, resources, knowledge, and money for sustained accumulation. Capitalism is a historical arrangement that gives Capital an institutional and political form.

The distinction can be put simply. When Capital joins liberalism, the result is liberal capitalism. When it joins socialism, the result may be state-organized accumulation. These are not interchangeable systems. Liberalism favors private property, markets, contracts, competition, and individual rights. Socialism favors public ownership, planning, collective welfare, and national development. My point is not that their differences disappear, but that neither arrangement necessarily abolishes Capital.

For this reason, Capital without socialism is a meaningful proposition. Socialism is not identical with Capital, nor does it necessarily abolish Capital. Governments organized in the name of socialism have often transferred control over productive resources from private owners to the state. They changed ownership and administration, but continued to organize society around labor, production, the expansion of technic, measurable productivity, surplus, and accumulation. Socialism could therefore oppose liberal capitalism while continuing to mobilize Capital.

This does not mean that socialism is merely another name for capitalism, or that Marxism can be reduced to the history of socialist states. It means that public ownership alone does not eliminate Capital. The decisive question is whether production remains governed by accumulation and expanded reproduction. A society may abolish the private capitalist while preserving institutions that compel people to increase production, generate a surplus, and reinvest it.

Marx himself helps clarify this problem. He did not use capitalism as his principal analytical term. He investigated Capital, capitalist production, and the capitalist mode of production. Capital, for Marx, was not simply money, machinery, wealth, or a class of owners. It was a social relation expressed through value, labor, surplus, and accumulation [2].

The word capitalism circulated before Max Weber [3], although Weber gave it an influential sociological meaning in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism [4]. Weber studied the moral discipline and rational organization associated with modern Western capitalism. Lenin later examined another dimension in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism[5]. His subject was the concentration of capital, finance, monopoly, the export of capital, and the division of the world among imperial powers. Lenin’s immediate sources included Marx, Engels, Rudolf Hilferding [6], and J. A. Hobson [7], rather than Weber alone.

Weber, Lenin, and Marx therefore addressed different problems. Weber examined the historical ethos of Western capitalism. Lenin studied capitalism as an imperial world system. Marx investigated Capital as a social relation. This distinction allows us to ask whether Capital can persist under institutions that do not conform to liberal capitalism.

Capital and capitalism should not be treated as independent agents. In liberal and Marxist discourses after Weber and Lenin, capitalism is often made to sound as if it acts on its own. But capitalism cannot exist without human designs, regulations, practical knowledge, implementation, and ideological orientation. People mobilize resources, organize labor, establish property, create markets, administer states, and make decisions. Owners, workers, managers, financiers, engineers, bureaucrats, consumers, and political parties reproduce Capital through institutions.

Knowing how keeps production, accounting, finance, logistics, planning, and administration running. But practical knowledge is not enough. Following Soviet semiotician Juri Lotman, I use metalanguage to name a second-order language through which a culture describes and organizes its own signifying practices [8]. I extend that idea here to the language that explains who should own resources, who has the right to direct production, which sacrifices society should accept, and which future accumulation is supposed to deliver [9].

Liberalism and socialism are rival metalanguages of Western modernity. Liberalism presents accumulation as a path toward liberty, prosperity, private initiative, and individual autonomy. Socialism presents organized production as a path toward equality, collective welfare, national development, and social emancipation. These languages do not merely conceal economic interests. They shape laws, institutions, ownership, distribution, labor discipline, and political authority.

A fuller equation would therefore be:

Capital + institutions + legitimating metalanguage = a historically specific regime of accumulation.

Even this formulation requires care. Seeds, land, tools, animals, stored food, and practical knowledge are means of production, but they are not necessarily Capital. Human communities possessed such means long before modern capitalism. What makes them Capital is not an inner property or autonomous force, but their place within social arrangements organized around accumulation.

A tool becomes Capital only when it enters a social arrangement directed toward accumulation. The same tool may support subsistence in one context and the production of surplus in another. Capital is therefore not a thing. It is a humanly created relation among people, mediated by things and expressed in value.

Why, then, does Capital often feel as if it acts on its own? Because people enter institutions whose rules are already in place. Workers need wages. Businesses must cover costs and usually reinvest. Governments need revenue, employment, supplies, and political stability. None of these pressures comes from land, money, or machinery by itself, and no single person controls the whole arrangement. The pressure comes from the relations that connect them.

These human arrangements can nevertheless acquire a coercive force. Property, labor, value, exchange, regulation, and accumulation create a recurrent pattern that participants encounter as a condition already in place. Once stabilized, that pattern confronts its makers as an objective social constraint. Capital names this relation when accumulation becomes its dominant principle; capitalism names the historical arrangements through which people institutionalize and orient it.

The conceptual question is therefore not whether socialism is another name for capitalism. It is whether changing ownership, political authority, and legitimating language is sufficient to displace Capital as an organizing relation. If Capital is a social relation rather than a thing, when and through which institutions did accumulation become a world-ordering principle? The next section begins with the Colonial Revolution: the conquest and invention of America, the creation of the logic of coloniality, and the formation of the capitalist world-economy within which industrial capitalism emerged.

III. From the Colonial Revolution to the Industrial Revolution

The distinction between Capital and capitalism becomes easier to see once we reverse the usual sequence. Industrial capitalism did not create the colonial world-economy. It emerged and operated within the logic of coloniality created during what I call the Colonial Revolution. The conquest and invention of America did not add a new region to an already existing capitalist world-economy; they constituted the Americas as a new geosocial space and, at the same time, constituted the modern world-system [10]. Marx approached this violent history through the concept of primitive accumulation.

Quijano and Wallerstein radically corrected and redressed his frame by showing that conquest, racial classification, and the articulation of multiple forms of labor around capital and the world market were not a preliminary stage before capitalism. They were constitutive of it. The Industrial Revolution was therefore possible only within a world-order already organized by coloniality [11]. Liberalism and socialism later emerged as rival nineteenth-century responses to an industrial order operating inside that colonial matrix.

The Industrial Revolution did not supersede the colonial economy opened by the Colonial Revolution; it expanded its reach and intensified its operations. Its technic—the material ensemble of railways, steamships, machinery, ports, and logistical systems—carried military power, settlers, labor, commodities, and extracted resources across colonial territories and imperial routes with greater speed and regularity. Colonial technic extended the infrastructures of coloniality and enabled Britain, France, and other European powers to widen their political and economic control during the nineteenth century [12]. Technology, in the sense I use here, is the discourse about technic: a metalanguage that names, organizes, directs, and legitimates those material practices by presenting colonial expansion as progress.

Liberalism offered one answer. It placed private property, contract, individual liberty, and the market at the center of commercial society. Adam Smith described an order coordinated through exchange and the division of labor [13]. The French Physiocrats located the source of the net product in agriculture and described economic circulation as a natural order [14]. Neither account fully described the industrial capitalism later studied by Marx, but both helped establish the economy as a distinct field of thought and government.

Saint-Simon accepted industry, science, the advance of technic, and material transformation. He rejected the liberal metalanguage according to which private competition alone could organize society. He argued that workers, engineers, scientists, and industrial organizers should coordinate production for collective benefit [15]. Early socialism did not simply reject the industrial order. It proposed another political and moral organization of it.

Liberalism and Saint-Simonian socialism can therefore be understood as rival projects for governing the productive powers intensified by industrialization. Liberalism relied mainly on property and markets. Saint-Simon relied on planning and productive administration. Both affirmed productions, the expansion of technic, and the transformation of nature. Socialism arose within this expanding productive order and tried to give it a different direction and purpose.

Marx changed the question. He did not treat socialism only as an ethical correction to liberal competition. He made Capital itself an object of investigation. For Marx, Capital was not merely money, machinery, wealth, or a class of owners. It was a social relation organized through labor, value, surplus, and repeated accumulation. Changing the administrators of production would not necessarily abolish that relation.

The history of the word capitalism also requires precision. Max Weber did not coin it. The term circulated in European languages during the nineteenth century. Weber gave it an influential sociological meaning in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, where he studied the moral discipline and rational organization associated with modern Western capitalism.

Lenin took the term in another direction, but not simply from Weber. His main sources included Marx, Engels, Rudolf Hilferding, and J. A. Hobson. In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin described a formation marked by monopoly, finance capital, the export of capital, international combines, and the territorial division of the world among major powers. Weber studied the historical ethos of Western capitalism; Lenin studied its monopolistic and imperial expansion; Marx investigated Capital as a social relation.

 

IV. Quijano and Wallerstein: America and the Coloniality of Power

Here I want to return to the history that the European debate leaves in the background. Quijano and Wallerstein change its map. The capitalist world-economy and the modern idea of America emerged together during the long sixteenth century. Capitalism was not completed inside Europe and then shipped overseas. The conquest and colonial organization of the lands named America transformed both sides of the Atlantic and created the territorial, political, and economic relations that constituted the modern world-system.

America was therefore not an already existing region that Europe simply discovered and incorporated. It was invented as a new geopolitical space through conquest, naming, mapping, conversion, administration, and expropriation. American silver and gold entered expanding commercial circuits; plantations supplied agricultural commodities; Indigenous lands were seized; Africans were enslaved and forcibly transported; and colonial ports connected these activities to European finance and trade. These processes helped shift the center of commercial power toward Atlantic Europe and made the colonies constitutive of European development.

Quijano and Wallerstein also reject the idea that capitalism began as a uniform system of free wage labor. The emerging world-economy coordinated several forms of labor at once: wage labor, slavery, tribute, servitude, peonage, petty commodity production, and household labor. These forms were not remnants outside capitalism. They were connected through the world market and distributed across regions according to the needs of accumulation. Wage labor became more common in parts of the European center, while coerced labor was concentrated in colonial zones whose production fed the same system.

A new classification of populations made this division of labor appear natural. Categories such as “Indian,” “Black,” “white,” and the many colonial gradations among them assigned different peoples to distinct forms of work, legal standing, mobility, authority, and recognized humanity. In Quijano’s terms, this racial classification became a basic axis of the coloniality of power. Race was not a prejudice added after an economic system had formed. It organized the control of labor and linked social identity to position within the world-economy.

This organization required force, but also a metalanguage that justified domination. Christian evangelization, the doctrine of discovery, and distinctions between civilization and barbarism converted conquest into mission, appropriation into rightful possession, and coerced labor into tutelage. Later secular and scientific theories of race renewed the hierarchy in another vocabulary. Coloniality thus joined material exploitation to the production of knowledge, identities, and standards of humanity.

Quijano’s colonial matrix of power helps make the distinction more precise [16]. Economy is one of its interrelated domains, not an autonomous agent. Knowledge is decisive across the matrix. Here I use Gilbert Ryle’s distinction between knowing how and knowing that [17] to identify two operations of knowledge: knowing how comprises the practical capacities required to design, regulate, administer, and implement production and exchange—the knowledge that organizes technic—while knowing that comprises the ideological metalanguage that names the world, establishes its hierarchies, and gives Capital a direction within the colonial matrix of power. Technological discourse is one form of this metalanguage: it interprets technic, directs its uses, and legitimates its material consequences. From this perspective, capitalism is mainly a liberal and Marxist concept, not a decolonial one. Decolonial analysis asks instead which human agents, institutions, classifications, and forms of knowledge organize the economic domain and orient Capital.

Trade, conquest, coerced labor, and the reinvestment of surplus had existed in other societies. The novelty did not lie in any one practice. It lay in their articulation within a single expanding division of labor that connected colonial territories, European states, commercial networks, and competing centers of accumulation. The distinction between center and periphery was produced within this system: the center concentrated political power and profitable activities, while peripheral zones were organized around expropriation, coerced labor, and the export of resources.

The the economic praxis and the idea of apitalism as we know it today was constituted at the confluence of Europe and the conquered territories named America. America was not capitalism’s external setting. Its invention, conquest, and colonization helped create the colonial matrix of power and organized the economic domain around accumulation. The capitalist world-economy emerged in the sixteenth century through the encounter of European agents with the lands, resources, and peoples of the territories renamed America. Coloniality supplied differentiated labor regimes, racial classifications, territorial hierarchies, institutions of rule, and legitimating languages that continued after formal colonial administrations ended.

This history changes the question. Liberalism and socialism offered rival ways of governing an industrial order already operating within the colonial matrix of power. Marx made Capital an object of critique. Quijano and Wallerstein showed that its world history cannot be separated from conquest, racial classification, heterogeneous labor, and the control of knowledge. What happens, then, when Capital is mobilized outside political liberalism and socialism is translated beyond its Western genealogy? China brings that question into the present.

V. China: Capital Without Western Liberalism and Socialism.

China brings the argument into the present. In Capital Without Liberalism, I argued that Capital remains powerful and productive outside political liberalism. What matters is who mobilizes it, toward which ends, and within which civilizational grammar. Capital directed toward individual accumulation and zero-sum competition produces domination. Directed toward collective improvement, higher living standards, and mutual benefit, it may serve different purposes. That is why I resist classifying China in advance as capitalist, socialist, state capitalist, or post-socialist.

This shifts the question from classification to political direction. In China, accumulation, expanded reproduction, the transformation of technic, and measurable productivity operate through institutions that do not grant liberalism authority over the political order. Markets are present, but they do not by themselves define the regime. The issue is which institutions direct Capital, which limits they impose, and which inherited concepts of social order give that direction legitimacy.

The Communist Party did not simply preserve Marxism and add markets. It translated Marxism into a Chinese political vocabulary shaped by sovereignty, national liberation, statecraft, collective continuity, and development. In this translation, socialism provides institutions for directing Capital and limiting private power, but it does not by itself abolish accumulation. China thus separates Capital from liberalism while retaining socialism as a language of political authority and collective purpose.

Confucianism matters here as part of the civilizational grammar within which Capital and socialism are interpreted [18]. Its traditions of relational obligation, social harmony, education, hierarchy, responsible rule, and the priority of collective order over possessive individualism offer terms that differ from liberal political thought. Yet Confucianism is not a complete explanation, and contemporary China is not the return of an unchanged ancient essence. Confucian legacies operate alongside Legalist statecraft, Marxism-Leninism, anti-imperial struggle, socialist planning, and participation in the world economy.

The relation among Capital, socialism, and Confucianism is therefore one of translation rather than simple fusion. Socialism supplies a modern political language of public direction, equality, labor, and national development. Confucian traditions supply a longer vocabulary of relation, obligation, harmony, and responsible government. Capital supplies productive and accumulative capacities. Their conjunction does not eliminate conflict, but it helps explain why China can employ markets and accumulation without accepting liberalism as the sovereign measure of political legitimacy.

China shows that Capital can operate without political liberalism while socialism and Marxism are translated beyond their Western genealogy. This conjunction takes shape within a Chinese project of sovereignty, development, and civilizational continuity. The decisive question remains unresolved: has the Chinese state subordinated Capital, or has Capital found in the state an effective instrument of accumulation? That tension prevents the argument from becoming either a celebration or a dismissal of the Chinese experience.

So, can Capital exist without socialism? Yes—because neither socialism nor liberalism is identical with Capital. Each organizes accumulation through different institutions, promises, and forms of authority. Coloniality reveals the global relations that made those arrangements possible, while China shows that Capital can operate within a political order that rejects liberal sovereignty and still pursues production, surplus, technic, and accumulation. The question I am left with is not which ideology owns Capital. It is who directs accumulation, which language legitimates it, whose labor sustains it, and whether society can keep Capital from becoming the measure of everything.

References

1.     Mignolo, Walter D. “Capital Without Liberalism: Decoupling Capital from the Western Political Imaginary.” Lo de Walter, September 20, 2026.

2.     Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I. Translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin, 1976. Originally published 1867.

3.     Kocka, Jürgen. Capitalism: A Short History. Translated by Jeremiah Riemer. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016.

4.     Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons. London: Allen & Unwin, 1930. Originally published 1904–1905.

5.     Lenin, V. I. Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism: A Popular Outline. Written 1916; first published 1917.

6.     Hilferding, Rudolf. Finance Capital: A Study of the Latest Phase of Capitalist Development. Edited by Tom Bottomore. Translated by Morris Watnick and Sam Gordon. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981. Originally published 1910.

7.     Hobson, J. A. Imperialism: A Study. New York: James Pott & Co., 1902.

8.     Lotman, Juri M. “On the Metalanguage of a Typological Description of Culture.” Semiotica 14, no. 2 (1975): 97–123.

9.     Mignolo, Walter D. “El metatexto historiográfico y la historiografía indiana.” MLN 96, no. 2 (1981): 358–402.

10. Quijano, Aníbal, and Immanuel Wallerstein. “Americanity as a Concept, or the Americas in the Modern World-System.” International Social Science Journal 44, no. 4 (1992): 549–557.

11. Quijano, Aníbal. “Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America.” International Sociology 15, no. 2 (2000): 215–232.

12. Headrick, Daniel R. “The Tools of Imperialism: Technology and the Expansion of European Colonial Empires in the Nineteenth Century.” The Journal of Modern History 51, no. 2 (1979): 231–263.

13. Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1776.

14. Quesnay, François. Tableau économique. 1758.

15. Saint-Simon, Henri. Henri Saint-Simon (1760–1825): Selected Writings on Science, Industry, and Social Organization. Translated and edited by Keith Taylor. London: Croom Helm, 1975.

16. Mignolo, Walter D. “The Colonial Matrix of Power.” In Talking About Global Inequality: Personal Experiences and Historical Perspectives, 39–46. Cham: Springer, 2023.

17. Ryle, Gilbert. “Knowing How and Knowing That.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 46 (1945–1946): 1–16.

18. Bell, Daniel A. China’s New Confucianism: Politics and Everyday Life in a Changing Society. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010.