Capitalism's biggest achievement must be that its mechanisms for "accumulation of wealth" have become barely recognizable as "actually taking away from others".
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I was merely concerned with certain aspects of capitalism, but on the large scale it seems zero-sum to me. If you look beyond the financial abstraction and control layer, in the end it's about redistributing two finite resources: physical things and labor, no?
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Capitalism is not just redistributing labor, it is a control layer that incentivizes innovation to replace labor. For instance, in modern capitalist countries, only 2% of labor is used to grow food, and food is much more plentiful than in any other time in history.
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Externalities normally do not count into that sum. Pollution of environments, natural and artificial
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Yes, all modernist societies have been set up for a short game. It is how we got to the present level of comfort and population numbers. Going back to feudalism or tribal societies does not seem to be an option though, and the alternatives to capitalism that were tried, failed.
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Since you can model many different games, both zero and nonzerosum, and can arguably call them capitalism, zero-sumness doesn't seem to be inherent in capitalism, but in the environment which determines the actual game that is played.
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And there may be an argument for capitalism shaping the environment to, in the long run, allow only for zero sum games, like Marx argued, but "in the long run" every society has collapsed at least partwise, so its a tautology.
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The negative parts are the externalities - Principally environmental costs? Also, externalities aside, obtaining wealth is largely a combination of luck & privilege.
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