Anyone who saves and invests their money is a Capitalist. This would be hairstylists who buy and sell their own haircare products on the side, or mechanics who save up enough to open their own garage, or of course industrialists who open a second or third or fourth factory.
Capital is savings. Given this, the extent to which we are a Capitalist society is the extent to which we operate on savings, to which we self finance. On that score, we do quite poorly, currently. How do we finance things? We borrow money.
I can’t overemphasize this: by creating money, banks create unearned ownership in private enterprise, and move us away from actual savings–through inflation and easy credit–and thus away from true Capitalism, as they exist today.
As I repeat often, I have proposed an overhaul of the system, which retains banks, but as Capitalist institutions, which build wealth for all, rather than takea share of it, in effect, for free.
The foundational element of wealth building is creation. It is creating new things, new processes, new distribution systems. Our system does foster these things, but we don’t see as much of the benefits as we ought to, since they are siphoned off.
Marx was not fully wrong, but he grossly misunderstood the nature of what he termed Capital, which in many of the cases was nothing of the sort. Borrowed money is not Capital, if it was created by the institution lending it. It is a leak in the system, which depressurizes it.