The Stagnant Working Class

[Fallawful]

I'll say something more to further shed light on my point above.

The reason I believe that most people in the West - in particular the United States - have confused capitalism for an ideology instead of the simple, non-normative economic model that it is, is because communism became a thing. I'll get to that in a sec.

In short, communism/marxism is an ideology based on an economic system. Communism has an end goal - to create an equal utopia. Capitalism on the other hand, does not have an end goal (This is the main important thing that does not make it an ideology). Capitalism at its core simply describes how markets operate. It does not say much about what should be the case, or how society should look. That is why Adam Smith was an economist, not a political philosopher.

Now, the reason people started to think that capitalism is an ideology is because of the cold war. This is only because it was on the opposing side of Communism. They assumed, naturally, that they were opposing ideologies - and for every thing that communist had, capitalism had the opposite. But this is not really the case, while communism was a political-ideological-economic model, capitalism was just an economic model. Different forms of democracy was the political model, and the ideological models varied between different European and North American states. These were all rolled into one purely by the fact that there was an "other" that combined all sorts of thing into one that was Communism. Capitalism does not also mean freedom of religion, expression etc. That's liberal democracy, and a completely different thing.