Memes

No, obviously there were exploiters and rent-seekers during the Bronze Age, but capital has a distinct dynamic as opposed to other means of production such as land, namely that it can be expanded: A hectar of land in an agrarian society only produces so much grain, vegetables, or livestock every year, but the only upper limit for the production of machinery is the amount of available labour.

A land-owner can only expand at the expense of other land-owners, while capitalists also can - and are even required to - expand at the expense of the workers they employ. They use machinery and labour to obtain wealth and then use that to obtain more machinery, and so on. This arrangement has a dynamic of exponential growth, which no previous form of production had, and therefore capitalists are in a position to shape society in vast excess of what land-owners can and could do.