These people who existed “prior to capitalism”, what political and economic model did they have?

You might enjoy David Graeber’s book Debt: The First 5000 Years, which goes into great detail about the extremely varied social/economic relationships found in cultures around the world.

The book is full of interesting informal systems of exchange, slyly presenting them as alternatives to the quantitative capital system we have today, but there are always tradeoffs. Reading the book I kept thinking how terrible it must have been to argue being wronged if you are a party that suffers a violation of the social exchange system and you're on the socially lower end (of power, popularity, etc.), Without a formal system. At least in our capital system if you are socially dispossessed and the numbers don't add up, there is the possibility of audit and petioning being the victim of fraud.

You don't need propaganda to value capitalism. Capitalism is the natural product of freedom. It is not a designed system, it is an emergent system.

> Capitalism is the natural product of freedom.

This is true in the sense that it is the natural products of a very specific conception of property rights that was advanced by the commercial class (they became the capitalist class) for their own benefit, and for which, several centuries after the model began becoming dominant in Western Europe “natural rights” justifications were concocted.

> It is not a designed system, it is an emergent system.

It wasn't “designed” in the sense of deep theory and engineering, and it is “emergent” in the sense that it is a product of individual advantage seeking by members of a particular social group.

You are thinking of markets. Capitalism requires the state. Property rights do not enforce themselves.

These days sloppy use of the word capitalism by both its proponents and critics means that colloquially capitalism == free markets, vs "the acquisition of capital as its own virtue"