Comment by hliyan

Perhaps this will help: commerce, free market and capitalism are three different things. Commerce, or trade, has existed for millennia, even among tribes and villages. The free market emerges when there are multiple producers of a good or service, and there is no compulsion upon any producer (from either a third party or another producer) to buy or sell. Capitalism would be when one or more of these producers no longer need to engage in production themselves, but are able to use their surplus savings to employ other producers and then keep for themselves the difference between market price and production cost (including cost of labor). There is nothing inherently wrong with that latter mode of production, except that it never reaches a dynamic equilibrium. Since it's surplus savings that enable the acquisition and direction of other producers (i.e. their labor), and that process leads to additional surpluses, the accumulation of surplus becomes exponential. At some point, the surplus becomes sufficient to apply compulsion on other producers, thus effectively eroding the free market that led to that mode of production in the first place.