The Ideology That Wasn’t Named

I want to follow up on last week’s post about Yuval Noah Harari’s appearance on The Ezra Klein Show, because something has been nagging at me since I listened to the episode, and I think it points to something important — not just about the conversation Harari and Klein had, but about the limits of the mainstream liberal framework within which both of them are operating.

The episode is about cooperation. About why human civilization depends on it, why right-wing populism threatens it, and what the failure of the liberal narrative means for the cooperative foundation on which modern society rests. It is a serious, substantive conversation, and I recommended it last week.

But there is an omission in it that I cannot stop thinking about.

In nearly two hours of conversation about the great competing ideologies of the modern era, capitalism is never named as an ideology.

Harari frames the ideological landscape of the twentieth century as a contest between three systems: fascism, communism, and liberalism. Unlike fascism or communism, which seek a final redemptive victory, liberalism is built on the assumption that conflict and disagreement are permanent features of human life, with its strength lying in self-correcting mechanisms such as independent courts, a free press, constitutional amendment, and regular elections.

This is a framework Harari has used consistently across his books and public appearances. It is a useful framework for certain purposes. But notice what it excludes.

Capitalism is not in the list.

Fascism is an ideology. Communism is an ideology. Liberalism is an ideology. But capitalism — the specific set of institutional arrangements that has organized economic life across most of the world for the past two centuries, that has produced both extraordinary wealth and extraordinary inequality, that has generated the ecological crisis and the concentration of platform monopoly power and the systematic enclosure of the commons — is presented not as an ideology but as the background condition within which the ideological contest takes place.

It is the water in which the fish are swimming. It is so thoroughly naturalized that it does not require naming.

This is not a minor oversight. It is precisely the condition that Mark Fisher identified as Capitalist Realism — the cultural situation in which capitalism has become not just an economic system but the horizon of the thinkable, the invisible boundary beyond which the mind simply stops.

Fisher’s formulation:

“ It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

describes exactly what is happening in the Harari-Klein conversation. Two of the most sophisticated public intellectuals working today, discussing the crisis of the cooperative order and analyzing the competing ideologies that have shaped modern history, and capitalism simply does not appear among them. It appears as the neutral ground on which the ideological battle is conducted.

But capitalism is not neutral ground. It is one of the most consequential ideological formations in human history — a specific set of choices about how to organize productive life, how to distribute resources, how to manage shared commons, what counts as value, and what gets excluded from the count. It has a history, a set of founding assumptions, and a set of institutional arrangements that are as contingent and as contestable as anything in fascism or communism.

The assumption that the self-regulating market is the natural and necessary form of human economic organization — that land, labor, and money should be treated as commodities to be priced by market mechanisms, that the commons should be enclosed rather than managed cooperatively, that the accumulation of capital is the proper measure of economic success — these are not facts of nature. They are historical choices, made at specific moments by specific actors with specific interests, and maintained by the same kind of ideological machinery that maintains every other set of arrangements that benefits those who control it.

Karl Polanyi demonstrated this in The Great Transformation (1944). The self-regulating market did not emerge naturally from prior human economic arrangements. It was deliberately constructed, through the systematic dismantling of the cooperative social forms — the commons, the guilds, the customary protections of labor — that had organized economic life before it.

Kropotkin demonstrated it from the other direction in 1902 — showing that the competitive, acquisitive individualism that capitalism presents as human nature is not the biological baseline but the cultural product of specific institutional arrangements, maintained against the cooperative impulse that expresses itself wherever those arrangements are removed.

Here is what is interesting about the three ideologies that Harari names: fascism, communism, and liberalism are all, in their different ways, theories about the state and political power. They disagree about who should hold power, how power should be legitimized, what the state should do with its power — but they all take the question of state power as the central question of political life.

Capitalism is a theory about the economy. It operates at a different level — not primarily about who holds political power but about how productive life is organized, how resources are allocated, how value is created and distributed. And it has, over the past two centuries, proved extraordinarily effective at presenting itself as outside the domain of ideology entirely — as the natural form of economic organization that any competent political system, whether liberal or fascist or communist, would have to accommodate.

This is why Harari can discuss the crisis of the cooperative order without naming capitalism as one of its drivers. In his framework, capitalism is not a competitor ideology threatening the liberal cooperative narrative. It is the economic system within which the liberal cooperative narrative is supposed to operate.

But this framing makes it impossible to see something that is, I would argue, the central dynamic of the present crisis: that capitalism, as currently organized, is itself one of the primary forces undermining the cooperative order that Harari and Klein are trying to defend.

The concentration of economic power in platform monopolies is dismantling the competitive market that capitalism claims to require. The externalization of ecological costs onto the commons is destroying the shared resources on which cooperative civilization depends. The enclosure of the digital commons by platform monopolies is converting what the cooperative community built as a gift into private property. The manufactured inequality of the past forty years has corroded the social trust that Harari correctly identifies as the foundation of cooperative civilization.

These are not threats to capitalism from outside. They are consequences of capitalism operating as designed.

Peter Kropotkin understood, with a clarity that the liberal framework has consistently struggled to achieve, that capitalism was not the neutral ground on which the ideological contest took place. It was one of the contestants — and one of the most effective suppressors of the cooperative alternative.

His arguments in Mutual Aid, Fields, Factories, and Workshops, and The Conquest of Bread were not primarily against fascism or communism, which were either nascent or nonexistent in his time. His argument was against the specific set of institutional arrangements — the enclosure of the commons, the commodification of labor, the organization of productive life around capital accumulation rather than genuine human need — that capitalism had imposed on the cooperative fabric of human social life.

He watched those arrangements destroy the cooperative social forms that had organized human communities for centuries — the guilds, the peasant communes, the mutual aid associations, the commons governance institutions — not through argument or persuasion but through the specific instruments that Polanyi would later document: enclosure legislation, the destruction of customary protections, the forced conversion of land and labor into market commodities.

The crisis of the cooperative order that Harari describes is real. His diagnosis of right-wing populism as a threat to it is correct. But the diagnosis is incomplete without naming the economic system that has been dismantling the cooperative fabric for two centuries — not as an external enemy of the liberal order but as its economic substrate, its background condition, its unnamed fourth ideology.

There is a useful question to ask about any framework that presents one of its central assumptions as a background condition rather than a choice: who benefits from the naturalization?

The naturalization of capitalism — its presentation as the neutral economic ground on which ideological contests take place rather than as one of the ideological contestants — benefits the specific actors and interests that the capitalist arrangement privileges. It makes the cooperative alternative appear as a deviation from the natural order rather than as the natural order from which capitalism is the deviation.

This is not a conspiracy. It is, as Fisher understood, the normal operation of a system that reproduces the conditions of its own existence by shaping what seems thinkable and unthinkable, within it.

Harari and Klein are not captured by this naturalization in a simple or crude way. Harari has, in other contexts, been willing to name capitalism as an ideology — describing ideologies like communism and capitalism as human-made stories, tools that can be evaluated by the suffering they prevent or cause. But in this specific conversation, in this specific framework, at this specific political moment, capitalism disappears from the ideological landscape and reappears as the water.

The fish, swimming in it, discuss the threats to the cooperative order. The water is not mentioned.

The framework that Mutual Aid Now offers is, I think, more complete than the Harari-Klein framework precisely because it names capitalism as one of the forces that has suppressed the cooperative tradition — alongside the state, alongside the specific political ideologies that have claimed to oppose capitalism while reproducing its hierarchical logic.

It also offers something that the Harari-Klein conversation, for all its intelligence and seriousness, does not quite manage: a positive account of the cooperative alternative that is grounded in biology and history and the living practice of actually existing cooperative institutions, rather than in a narrative that needs to be defended against more compelling narratives.

The cooperative alternative does not need a better story to survive. It needs the removal of the institutional barriers — economic as well as political — that prevent the cooperative impulse that is already present in human beings from expressing itself at the scale the situation requires.

That means naming capitalism as one of those barriers. Not as the enemy to be destroyed — Kropotkin was not a Marxist, and Mutual Aid Now is not a Marxist book — but as one of the ideological formations whose specific institutional arrangements have been systematically dismantling the cooperative fabric that human civilization depends on.

The conversation Harari and Klein are having is important. It is also, in this specific respect, a conversation happening within the very framework it needs to examine.

The fourth ideology is water. Until we name it, we cannot see it. Until we see it, we cannot understand why the house is unmaintained — or what maintenance actually requires.

Mutual Aid Now: Kropotkin, Cooperation, and the Survival of Civilization is available on Amazon. If last week’s post raised the question of what Harari’s cooperation argument is missing, this week’s post is the answer. The book develops it across fourteen chapters of biology, history, philosophy, and contemporary practice.

The water has a name. Kropotkin’s notebooks knew it all along.