Capitalism is where there is a class of people whose role is to own things. Or put another way, it's where substantial portions of industry are owned by private interests that the public has little oversight over. Money and markets don't necessarily require capitalism. Free markets can exist without capitalism with systems like these:
- All businesses are employee-owned, such as through cooperatives, or employee stock ownership plans where employees own effectively all the stock.
- Businesses are publicly owned via a democratic government, but those businesses are expected to operate in a largely self-sufficient way, and are allowed to compete with each other.
- Public ownership like above, but by industrial unions
Those are forms of "market socialism". A real system is likely to have a mixed economy, such as cooperatives, with some state-controlled or union-controlled industries for cases where trade-offs don't favor market competition.
