[sniffers]

You can argue that, but you'd be wrong. Don't confuse mercantilism and trade with capitalism. They are outwardly similar, but very different internally.

The fundamental feature of capitalism is the inversion of commodity -> money -> commodity relationship into money -> commodity -> money.

[FloorEgg]

I don't think that's the distinction that matters, more-so the relative development of financial systems and degree of state intervention. Ultimately it boils down to whether you're defining capitalism as a spectrum from proto to modern or as a system with properties surpassing thresholds reached in modern time (post-mercantalism).

My point was more so that the underlying mechanisms of capitalism, when abstracted and measured on scales, show up in many places in nature and throughout human history.

So it's useful to debate how we can improve our capitalist system, but to do away with it all together is naive and unnatural and unlikely to lead to better outcomes, as it's doing away with distributed competition and coordination algorithms necessary for evolutionary advancement and increasing complexity.

We can pick this apart in detail and squabble over taxonomy/semantics but I would just find it interesting and enriching, and unlikely to be invalidating.