Ironically, many orthodox Marxists tend to "fetishize" the radically unique nature of capital as a historical phenomenon, a condition that could be readily analyzed and rectified by their own concepts and terminology. It makes sense to focus in on the unique nature of capital at the expense of other distracting elements for the sake of a clear analysis, but then oftentimes history itself is compressed into a background phenomenon leading up to the birth of capital, itself the object more worthy of intensive spotlight and study.
It does seem true that there is a historical specificity to capital as an economic form, corresponding with greater modernity in general. Just a couple of hundred years ago, most of the world's population were still subsistence farmers, their surplus scraped off through local military force as opposed to it being a regular intrinsic occurrence in the cycles of daily capitalist production. That was before the disintegration of the feudal world clumped back up into a collection of larger and more rapacious landholders, and capital coalescing out of the consolidating commons of the agricultural and artisanal crafting realms would concentrate its factory systems in the growing and accelerating urban realms, and then soon enough a large portion of the developed world would transform in wage laborers, that system steadily absorbing and transforming the outer reaches of the world system's core.
People, resources, materials, and monies would be "alienated" and set free to circulate in domestic and world markets, a process which owed its power and comprehensiveness to the parallel processes of accelerated technological development and intensified energy production, including the progressive utilization of coal and then oil, and then these developments in turn would be furthered by the very explosions in trade and industry they were setting off.
But then these patterns and behaviors go back quite a ways into the last couple of thousand years of the history of human civilization. Capital had to emerge fully formed from scattered cyclical patterns and tendencies that have been with us for some time.
Metal coinage might have emerged organically as more firmly coupled with its given originating state for instance, but then the material was still capable of being "alienated" from its home economy, especially as the technology grew to be accepted in its standardized form by participating regional powers in a global economy. Gold and silver for example were perfectly suitable to the various functions of money: a transportable, and non-perishable medium of exchange and store of wealth, settler of debts, and numerical measurer of value.
There were most likely dominant powers presiding over trade that were producing it and standardizing it, which put pressure onto its universal usage as a particular substance and form. So it was then that Philip II's Macedonian empire could descend upon silver mines and stores in the ancient Greek world and take the silver up to finance the further development of their military, bringing about the flowing in of materials and resources, alienated from producers desiring and requiring the alienated silver themselves for their own purposes, bypassing the general uneasiness in the Greek world of Macedon's rising star. This is but one of a multitude of examples of a process that would make up the cyclical flows of resources across powers around the world and through history.
Money is a magical substance in a way, which, as it circulates, facilitates the rhythmic circulation of alienated resource and surplus, provided there is an overarching trust in that particular form's value. If you are handed a legitimate token of exchange, say a US 20 dollar bill for example, you can feel instantly that settling or that pull of an obligation fulfilled or an obligation created.
