As for “fascism” or “corporatism,” I generally don’t like the right-libertarian talking point that what we have is corporatism rather than capitalism. What Mussolini meant by “corporatism” or “fascism” was quite different. The term “corporation” in Mussolini-style fascism referred to guilds or syndicalist co-operatives. Italian fascism developed out of marxist syndicalism. The term fascio had a dual meaning in Italian. The Latin fasces literally meant “a bundle” (as in a bundle of sticks) and referred to the Roman symbol for unity and strength/authority. (See image below.) In Italian, the term also meant “league” (as in a league of men) and could therefore designate a political party, a syndicate, or guild. So, the term “corporations” to fascists actually referred to workers’ guilds or co-operatives, not to corporations in the capitalist sense. Fascism and actually existing capitalism bear no similarity whatsoever. Fascism was a form of authoritarian socialism, in line with the dual meaning of fascio as designating both authority and socialist co-operative, not a form of crony capitalism. (Cf. Larry Gambone, The Road to Fascism)

The term “capitalism,” like “socialism,” has several different and contradictory meanings. The term capitalism was coined by socialists to refer to actually existing capitalism, not to refer to free markets. Technically, the socialist that coined the term, Thomas Hodgskin, advocated replacing capitalism with a free market. It “is recorded from 1872, originally used disparagingly by socialists. Meaning ‘concentration of capital in the hands of a few…’”(Online Etymology Dictionary) Generally speaking, critiques of capitalism define capitalism as an economic system in which capital and means of production are concentrated into the hands of the few, such that the vast majority of the populace has little choice but to work for wages. This is the definition of capitalism that was historically used by socialists, from Thomas Hodgskin and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon to Karl Marx and Eduard Bernstein. This situation of wealth concentrated into the hands of the few and the majority of people having to work for them was not caused by free-market processes; even Karl Marx recognized that.

“The capitalist system presupposes the complete separation of the labourers from all property in the means by which they can realize their labour. As soon as capitalist production is once on its own legs, it not only maintains this separation, but reproduces it on a continually extending scale….
“The prelude of the revolution that laid the foundation of the capitalist mode of production, was played in the last third of the 15th, and the first decade of the 16th century. A mass of free proletarians was hurled on the labour market by the breaking-up of the bands of feudal retainers, who, as Sir James Steuart well says, “everywhere uselessly filled house and castle.” Although the royal power, itself a product of bourgeois development, in its strife after absolute sovereignty forcibly hastened on the dissolution of these bands of retainers, it was by no means the sole cause of it. In insolent conflict with king and parliament, the great feudal lords created an incomparably larger proletariat by the forcible driving of the peasantry from the land, to which the latter had the same feudal right as the lord himself, and by the usurpation of the common lands. ”(Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1, Part 8, Ch. 27)

During the era of the enclosures in England (and elsewhere), the government confiscated the land of the peasants and handed it over to feudal lords. This theft is what laid the foundation for capitalism. Distributists, mutualists, and marxists all follow this same basic analysis. The current distribution of wealth was not caused by free-market processes but by government theft of land from the peasants. The government took their land and handed it over to feudal lords, landlords. This allowed the lords to collect rent or tax the peasants for the use of the land, even though the peasants had previously been the rightful owners of the land. According to a Lockean theory of property rights, even a Rothbardian interpretation of it, the land would naturally belong to the peasants, since they are the ones that acquired it through “adding their labor to it.” But the State stole their property and gave it to someone else, and their new landlords extracted rent (taxing the peasants), and thereby were allowed to accumulate massive amounts of wealth without ever contributing any labor. This accumulation of wealth via theft is what allowed for the vast accumulations of capital that were necessary for funding the industrial revolution.

It’s important to realize that the people who criticize capitalism aren’t always criticizing a free-market, but rather criticizing the system of wage-slavery (the system in which most people have to work for wages in order to survive) which is predicated on the historical theft of land from the masses. I am not a fan of Marx, but Marx was correct in his theory of “the primitive accumulation of capital” being rooted in government stealing land from the masses and giving it to a select few individuals. Personally, I find distributism to be more interesting than marxism. I like the analysis of Hilaire Belloc, on how the really unequal distribution resulted from the enclosures, and how property can be restored to people in general. (Cf. Hilaire Belloc, The Way Out & An Essay on the Restoration of Property; also, CF. Christopher A. Ferrara, The Church and The Libertarian)

On the definition of capitalism, see Kevin A. Carson’s Free-Market Anti-Capitalism. I recognize that anarcho-capitalists tend to define “capitalism” as a free market. And it’s fine to use that definition, as long as you keep in mind that most other people don’t really define the term that way. For critiques of capitalism, a market is a necessary condition but not a sufficient condition for identifying a system as capitalistic.

Also, equating capitalism with free-markets causes confusion, since many writers that were historically "anti-capitalist" were actually advocating that capitalism be replaced with totally free markets. (E.g. Benjamin Tucker, Lysander Spooner, et al.) At a very minimum, we need to not use the term capitalism to mean an absolutely free market when we are talking about historical writers who defined terms differently, otherwise we might as well not discuss their ideas at all.