For the indigenous peoples of the American Plains, the key element of cultural life was the buffalo. For members of the culture of capitalism the key element is money. Money defines relationships among people, not just between customer and merchant in the marketplace or employer and laborer in the workplace. Increasingly in modern society, money defines relationships between parent and child, among friends, between politicians and constituents, among neighbors, and between clergy and parishioners. Money forms the central institutions of the modern market and economy, and around it are grouped the ancillary institutions of kinship, religion, and politics.
Money is the very language of commerce for the modern world.
Consumers want to spend as much money as they can, laborers want to earn as much as possible, and capitalists want to invest it so that it can return more. There is the potential for much conflict in these arrangements. The capitalist wants to pay each person, as laborer, as little as possible, but wants the person, as consumer, to earn enough to purchase the commodities from which profits accrue. We can perhaps best conceptualize the working of the culture of capitalism as sets of relations between capitalists, laborers, and consumers, each depending on the other, yet each placing demands on, and often conflicting with, the others. However, if we look at capitalism as one cultural adaptation out of many, we will better able to understand and judge the effects it has had on the world's peoples and see its spread not as inevitable development, growth, or modernization, but as the displacement, for better or worse, of one way of life by another.