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’.
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