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Private property under feudalism wasn't available to all. There can be no capitalism without liberalism. Property rights as a matter of law and everyone being equal under the law is essential.

Earlier partial market economies were in practice more like command economies with relatively small free markets in certain sectors.

Monarchs and nobles having estates is functionally indistinguishable from private property.

They key difference is that only nobles could have private property.

>Abraham Lincoln was a Marxist, for example.

Is this widely accepted by historians or is this a fringe theory? Marx's Capital wasn't published until after Lincoln's death, so I'm a bit skeptical.

Capitalism has a definition, and you don't get to change it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism

> supposedly non-capitalist countries.

They are State Capitalist. There's no supposition about it. That the governing body is captured by Communist ideologues has no bearing. Hence there are now billionaires operating in China and Russia.

> They existed in the Communist bloc.

They were re-introduced so fast it would make your head spin when Lenin's reforms were shown to be a disaster.

> Capitalism didn't create markets or a market economy.

I did not say so, and this is perhaps where your confusion lies. I said Capitalism is the right to private property and a market economy. I did not say markets are strictly endemic to Capitalism. Although you'll find no scalable one in a liberal democracy devoid of Capitalism.

> We can point to an example of people living co-operatively in, oh I don't know, the article of this submission?

A co-op is not tantamount to a society, it's an employer. The existence of a co-op in itself does not jeopardize the right to private property, or by extension Capitalism.

This is why the quiet part the zealots eventually meander to is "see, we just have to force people to..."

> Consider this: markets exist in supposedly non-capitalist countries. They existed in the Communist bloc. We've got cuneiform tablets describing markets going back 5000+ years. Capitalism didn't create markets or a market economy.

A market economy is one where resources (commodities, labour, services) are distributed primarily via the pricing mechanism, prices can be set freely by market participants and the market is generally open. It isn't merely an economy where markets exist.

Your examples were not market economies. They heavily restricted market access through guilds, hereditary jobs, serfdom, feudal law and trading licenses. They fixed prices through price edicts and decrees. On top of that, the majority of the population were subsistence farmers who also made most of their tools themselves. This means that the vast majority of resources were not traded in a market.

> That too is relatively new. Abraham Lincoln was a Marxist, for example.

Really? You're just going to state this as a fact without any backing at all?