The criticisms of capitalism, at least from a scientific standpoint, are not that people under capitalism are doing bad things, it's either that (i) under previous or potentially future modes of production there would be little or no incentive to do those things, (ii) capitalism has exacerbated the degree to which the behavior persists. The second part of the criticism is that capitalism is a class society, and thus rife with the antagonism that comes with class society in the form of "contradictions", which manifest themselves in capitalism as the contradiction of abstract and concrete labour, use-value and exchange value, capital and labour, price and value, culture and the commodity etc.
The modern middle-class society of the present day would quite simply be utterly unrecognizable to 19th-c. theorists of "capitalism [as] a class society". In fact, they would find that most, if not all, of the policy goals that they originally set for themselves have been achieved, in a market economy! The Chinese leadership understands this quite well, BTW; the above consideration plays a significant role in their understanding of what a "socialism with Chinese characteristics" should look like.
The fact that the class structure has been complicated does not mean it has disappeared, nor does the increase in class mobility mean that classes have disappeared. It's worth noting that it's not only the 19th century theorists who thought of capitalism as class society, but relatively recent ones too. The notion that the "concrete aims" of Marx and company (if you're referring to them) have been fulfilled is farcical - they didn't only call for an increase in living conditions for non-capitalists, they called for a society different in kind, not just degree. I'd be interested in how core ideas such as "abolition of the value-form" play into a system to which they are antagonistic (market economy).
A lovely quote from the 60s:
“If the worker and his boss enjoy the same television program and visit the same resort places, if the typist is as attractively made up as the daughter of her employer, if the Negro owns a Cadillac, if they all read the same newspaper, then this assimilation indicates not the disappearance of classes, but the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the preservation of the Establishment are shared by the underlying population.” (Herbert Marcuse)
And from the same person:
“Not every problem someone has with his girlfriend is necessarily due to the capitalist mode of production.”
Isn't that a feature of only the final stage of social evolution according to Marx? The one that Marx calls "communism" (not to be confused with e.g. "communist countries" or "communist parties", as a reference to their politics). A close relative to the communist stage wrt. the theory of market economies would be what we call a "post-scarcity economy" - except that it's not really a 'core idea' in any sense. It might or might not happen at some point in the future, but a market theorist has no need for that hypothesis.
I'd love to comment about the remark you quote regarding the "preservation of the Establishment" and how ironic it sounds today, but to do that I'd have to mention some quite uncomfortable facts about present-day political dynamics, which would take us very far from the subject, and deep into partisan controversy. Sorry!
So? What came before capitalism? Feudalism. That was a class society at least as much as capitalism is.
BTW: Why "contradiction"? It looks like Marx chose that word in order to make the fall of capitalism look inevitable - it has contradictions, so it must be self-inconsistent, so it must fall, right? But it looks to me that what Marx is describing is just the differences that occur in any society. In what way are they truly contradictions (in the normal sense of the word)?
More like 15th century, is the widely accepted chronology. And it did bring with it a totally different kind of horror, including colonialism...
(China could have had an iron-based industrial revolution long before Europe. But the mandarins saw that some lower-class people were getting rich, and so they shut it down by force.)
Also: Colonialism is an evil of capitalism? The Roman Empire did something very like colonialism. The Spanish in the 1500s weren't exactly capitalists, either.
