? Their culpability on that count has nothing to do with whether this particular argument is a fair one or not. If you do something unfair to a guilty person it was still an unfair thing

Err, companies go back before the invention of capitalism. Ignoring government chartered companies (which date back to the earliest governments, and therefore served monarchical economic systems), the first common-stock company was the Dutch East India Company (sometimes known as VOC) and was founded under a mercantilist economic system.

And the VOC was hard-core manipulative and monopolistic.

If you want to claim that companies were invented to serve the rapacious profiteer, then all good--that's mostly true. But as a factual matter, they are not the invention of capitalism and long predate it.

> Companies are just an abstraction we invented purely to facilitate capitalism, a simple organizational unit in the market.

No. The earliest companies in various cultures go back more than a thousand years and they have emerged for a variety of reasons -- pooled risks and resources, family businesses needing to hire non-relatives, tradesmen needing to hand their businesses on to their apprentices, etc.

Capitalism is actually pretty new. It's not much older as a practice than its definition.

Kongo Gumi alone existed for more than a thousand years before capitalism became a meaningful economic model.

The livery companies in the UK date back 600 years before the UK was a capitalist system.

And we could still have various forms of companies in a non-capitalist system, which in turn does not automatically mean communism.