Capitalism is just the idea that capital is privately owned and the economy is loosely organized around that concept.

From the IMF

In a capitalist economy, capital assets—such as factories, mines, and railroads—can be privately owned and controlled, labor is purchased for money wages, capital gains accrue to private owners, and prices allocate capital and labor between competing uses

If you compare this to something like socialism which says that capital assets should be held by the society at large. There is no one guy that can own a mine but the mine is owned by society at large.

Capitalism often likes to wear the clothes of “free markets” because most people like the idea of freedom. Not a lot of people are super keen on the idea that “some rich guy should be allowed to own all the railroads if he wants” (unless you are a rich guy that owns a bunch of railroads) so capitalists like to conflate capitalism and the free market as though they are one inseparable idea.

Other economic systems can also have free markets with collective ownership. Worker cooperatives, for example, exist within capitalist economies.

The existence of a stock market is not actually needed for capitalism. The people that own the means of production don’t necessarily need to set up a system where people can purchase a share of their companies. It might be an emergent property of capitalism, if people don’t want to start their own profit generating enterprises but want to share in the gains of a profit generating enterprise they would be willing buyers. People with profit generating enterprises might be willing sellers if they think they could over time generate more profit by raising capital from the stock buyers. But if you didn’t have a stock market and private individuals controlled the capital assets of your society, by definition you’d still be capitalist since that’s the defining characteristic.

As an example you could outlaw all financial instruments in America and as long as I can still own a factory and sell my goods for a profit, it would still be capitalism.

I think economic systems are fascinating. We often colloquially conflate various things that tend to happen together but really aren’t related at all. Of course if I hold the capital assets I would want you to associate capitalism with the positive aspects of a free market and sorta ignore the part where I get to own the capital asset and charge everyone else to have access to it.

The stock market is one of the hallmarks, but the one thing capitalism can't do without, is the capitalist class, because it wouldn't be capitalism any more. The private people who own the things and earn the profits by sheer virtue of having a lot already.

OK yeah, but don't think a group of 6 monkeys is gonna invent financialization.

I don't recall the mention of fruit. Rather, currency was used.

If they did it still wouldn't be capitalism. Capitalism isn't just when market, and I don't know why it's important that sex is the thing being offered except to make it sound worse because our society hates sex workers.

Communism isn't about sharing equally, but fulfilling everyone's needs off of everyone's abilities.

Tools are owned in common, but distribution is based on needs.

There are two types of community animals. That is, animals that live with others of their own species for the majority of their life.

One type generally shares everything, all members work to collect resources, and those resources are shared with all members. There's no concept of ownership. You find this in a lot of birds, ants are a good example, some species of great ape to an extent.

The other type is the opposite. Not all members gather, and some members seem to believe they own resources as they're brought in. Lions are a great example, where not only do the men not actively participate in hunting, but they aggressively defend kills and take the largest portions for themselves. And then also another species of great ape that has gone as far as to invent currency just to let a handful of apes control most of it.