Capital is an accumulation and hoarding of wealth over and above what is required for a comfortable life. Wealth includes money, of course, but it often takes the form of assets, especially land, gold, and precious objects. Anything that a bank would count as collateral for a loan. Saving for a rainy day doesn't count, as one always knows that one will spend savings eventually.
Capital is wealth that one doesn't need.
A Capitalist is someone who earns the bulk of their income from lending their capital to others in return for interest. The majority of capitalists inherit their capital from their parents.
Capitalism is the ideology which says that society should be run by and for capitalists.
Under capitalism, workers are an expense not an asset. Wages are subtracted from profits. Under capitalism, every workplace is a run like a feudal fief. And if you still earn a wage or salary, but you don't have surplus wealth, you are not a capitalist. You are merely a capitalist flunky (at best).
The aim of the ideology of capitalism is to generate more capital for fewer people. And it doesn't matter how many workers are killed, maimed or enslaved in the process. Wealth is the measure of all things.
Most countries have extensive laws to protect people from capitalists because capitalists has proven that they don't care about people. So we need labour laws preventing, mitigating, or requiring extra wages for overworking, dangerous work; equality laws so that men and women are paid the same for the same work; anti-discrimination laws to eliminate systemic prejudice, anti-pollution laws because capitalism has toxic waste products; antitrust laws to prevent monopolies, etc.
Capitalism is an acknowledged danger to society.
Free Market Capitalism adds a twist. Rather than laws to protect people from capitalism, neoliberals in the mid 20th century proposed that "markets" would solve all problems. People would no longer need laws to protect them from capitalists because if a capitalist was unethical, the market would reflect that by raising prices or reducing demand. No judgement was involved, it was the apotheosis of social Darwinism: survival of the richest.
Free Market Capitalism swept the world in a revolution beginning ca 1971, that eventually controlled all the major world governments (with a huge impact even in China), all of associated central banks, as well as global institutions such as the IMF and World Bank. Revolutionary measures to ensure the health of capitalism were instituted around the world: labour unions were disbanded and/or defanged; laws protecting us from capitalists were repealed; third world economies were forced to adopt free market policies. At the same time democratic reforms were entirely neglected. Dozens of small nations were forced deeper into poverty; large nations like Brazil, India, and Russia voted for fascism (the spectre of fascism is once again haunting us).
The only laws that were never addressed were taxations laws: the burden of taxation continues to fall on workers while capitalists exploit legal loopholes to avoid paying their share.
We are now much worse off than my parents generation economically, but at the same time we have now created some three thousand billionaires. This is not simply more wealth than one could spend in a lifetime, it's more than one could spend in a hundred lifetimes. If you earned the average wage for 1000 years and didn't spend any of it, you would still not be a billionaire.
Capitalism is killing the planet.
Meanwhile the waste products of capitalism are accumulating. Capitalism is driving systemic problems with potentially civilisation-ending consequences: global warming, rising levels of pollution, the mass destruction of ecosystems. It only takes disruption of the global food supply to cause widespread chaos, and it has already become significantly more challenging to grow food.
