Capitalism needs the state to function, because the legal pooling of assets and authority that takes place within capitalism needs laws and enforcement. Someone

Capitalism needs the state to function, because the legal pooling of assets and authority that takes place within capitalism needs laws and enforcement. Someone who comes in and says they're an "owner" without that backing just gets their stuff stolen - that is how things tend to play out in cultures that don't have a strong central hierarchy. So, having the state set the rules is a way to have the hierarchy with relatively less overt violence and an emphasis on trade relations as a form of status. The violence instead gets redirected towards market competition, exploitation, legal threats, etc. From that, the rest of capitalism as a system derives from whatever rules are in play at the moment: the numbers of the financial system, acting as scorekeeping, drive speculative manias and panics, and the laws in the court are weapons to use on whoever opposes you. The system stays stable where it supports the overlapping interests of the elite - so all the formalities of government are just a continuous process of normalization; if a so-and-so wants the country to go in big in a certain direction - to train a kind of workforce or build an industry or invest in developing a technology - they can groom the political system to go their way, provided everyone else at the top agrees. A lot of things go undeveloped because "there is no money in them," and this is just a reflection of lack of political will to make that the thing that someone could have as a job. The technological competition of industrialization did a great deal to wake up the sleepy parts of the world into thinking "we need to change policies if I want to stay in power", and we definitely have more of that ahead. This is more evidenced when you visit a different country and you look around and ask "why is this part so much better and that part so much worse" and a local will tell you that the law does this and the economy does that, so you get a better thing here and a worse thing there. And that's all a bit disappointing because it means we really don't have a lot of things figured out and are just reacting like the apes we are as all these new things sweep through society, but it does mean that we could potentially do a lot better by getting the right kinds of conversations started.