Err, companies go back before the invention of capitalism. Ignoring government chartered companies (which date back to the earliest governments, and therefore s

Err, companies go back before the invention of capitalism. Ignoring government chartered companies (which date back to the earliest governments, and therefore served monarchical economic systems), the first common-stock company was the Dutch East India Company (sometimes known as VOC) and was founded under a mercantilist economic system. And the VOC was hard-core manipulative and monopolistic. If you want to claim that companies were invented to serve the rapacious profiteer, then all good--that's mostly true. But as a factual matter, they are not the invention of capitalism and long predate it.