With land capitalism has always played a double game. From land come the ‘free gifts’ on which accumulation depends; but precisely because they are free, for capital these goods are worth nothing in themselves. To acquire value they must be ‘put to work’, and to be ‘put to work’ they must be appropriated. As stated by Locke, who can be considered one of the founders of the ideology of capital, what originally belong to all can and should be privatized in order to motivate the owner to extract as much value as possible, for his (the male pronoun is mandatory!) and everyone's benefit.

From Marx to Weber, from Benjamin to Polanyi: many have argued that capitalism is more than an economy. To use a successful expression by Nancy Fraser, it is an institutionalized social order, in the same way that feudalism is. It thus includes not only an organization of economic relations but also a conception of reality, a morality and a structuring of the relations within and between all social spheres. By the same token, capitalism tends to hegemonize the sense of the world and the existence of those who dwell in it, crushing or denying the exterior, the other than oneself. Its peculiarity, however, lies, on one side, in that the crises it goes through are not accidental and disruptive events but structural and propulsive; on the other, on its extraordinary capacity to react to external threats. Capitalism has so far managed to incorporate, to mould in its own image, everything it has encountered on its way.