Why a fixation on capitalism now? It does feel a little quaint, a little dated, so to speak, considering the wide scope of inquiry available in the vast, rich intellectual domain that exists thanks to digital culture.
Well, besides the fact that capitalism as a phenomenon takes up such a vivid presence in the radical imagination - like a fire commands attention to the owner of a straw house - capitalism, as a phenomenon of disintegration, makes for a useful skeleton key that can unlock the secrets of civilization, or how a complex society unfolds over time.
Disintegration makes one more intensely aware of the structure that is doing the disintegrating. Or, after an engine has already been invented, and one isn't building it up from scratch, the easiest way to understand how it actually works is to take it apart.
If one understands how things disintegrate, one can begin to understand how things are constructed, and how those things persist. Put everything together and you've got a passable theory of history, if history is to be construed as the movements of complex human civilizations.
Besides all that, it is much easier to understand an age if one is vividly present in it, that is, living through it and observing it in person. Capitalism is one of the central characteristics of our age after all.
The lack of a retrospective vantage point does make for some considerable difficulty. One isn't able to use the long arc of history to situate current events and compare their contours against the general topography of history's procession.
However one is given the advantage of being steeped in the ideological and perceptual landscape of one's time. To truly understand Greek logic and law for example, and how it relates to ancient society, one must have somewhat of a grasp on the Greek conception of time and space, something that is exceedingly difficult, but perhaps doable.
Though as Spengler so perceptively observed, a civilization that gazes over the history of some past or parallel civilization is really re-coding the outside civilization's experiences within the perceiving civilization's ideological and perceptual landscape.
