You’re right. It’s not a capitalist phenomenon. It’s the inevitable product of ANY social structure with a hierarchy of power/authority. Capitalism is just the dominant present form, and it’s a very successful form of control.
Consolidation is the natural evolution of power. Whenever one person has more social power or authority than another, it also means greater ability to seek more for oneself. It doesn’t matter what the claim is. They’re all social constructs. They’re all illusions which we allow to control our daily lives… royal blood, color of skin, academic recognition, relations with god, or money…
Money works so well because of the way it distributes hope and blame. Supposedly everybody has opportunity to succeed, and if you fail it’s obviously your fault. You just didn’t work hard enough or possess the divine inspiration to create a product, and there’s plenty of rags to riches stories out there to keep us convinced that we could be the next chosen one.
But money is no more valid than any of the other excuses I listed for enforcing self-importance on society. Tons of studies are done concerning wealth distribution and they all point to massive and growing inequality. The easiest statistics to find and quote are on Wikipedia.
“A study by the World Institute for Development Economics Research at United Nations University reports that the richest 1% of adults alone owned 40% of global assets in the year 2000, and that the richest 10% of adults accounted for 85% of the world total.”
So 10% of the world’s people owns most of the world. This means those 10% of people own the necessities of survival for most everybody else. This means that in order to survive, the bottom 90% of the world’s population must work for the top 10%. This means that the top 10% enjoys the privilege of designing the rules of everyday life for the bottom 90%. That 90% has the freedom to obey those rules, or be cast into a short life of extreme poverty or imprisonment. It doesn’t matter if those rules are designed to enforce the supremacy of that top 10%.
What does that top 10% offer to the rest of the world in return? Very little. They are there for no other reason than they own the means of survival for everyone else. Be it a factory farm, intellectual property rights to medical formulas, or land.
This is called Wage Slavery, and opportunity and competition can hardly be considered features. The only forms of competition are in the Have-Nots competing for the favor of the Haves, and competition between the Haves leading to ever increasing consolidation of power.
These dynamics are consistent across all forms of social hierarchy from Monarchy to Capitalism to Representative Democracy.