What Chinese Capitalists Owe to Mao Zedong

” We can think about the distinction between the market and capitalism using the analogy of a farmer’s market and a grocery store. In the traditional farmer’s market, people are trading things with one another for money and using money to buy things. But in a gigantic grocery corporation like Safeway or Giant, all the profit is accumulated and reinvested by the store. Profit is the central goal of these monopolistic operations, which run on a very different logic from a market. So that is the basic distinction between the market and capitalism.”

That’s a distinction without a difference.

The farmer is accumulating profit for the same purposes as Safeway - to use it to either invest or consume.