In what ways does capitalism differ from Marxism?

Answer 1

In pretty much every way you can think of. Under Marxism, there is no individual wealth. Under capitalism, that's everyone's goal.

As described by Marx & Engles in their early writings Marxism/Communism is the ultimate inevitable economic system resulting from the historically unavoidable collapse of capitalism. It is seen as a spontaneous transition/break that could be neither hindered nor assisted, but only waited for. When the time was right the change would happen in the vast majority of industrialized capitalist countries almost simultaneously, then spread to the remaining industrialized capitalist countries, then finally to the poor agrarian colonial countries.

Yes, there would be no wealth but also no poverty; the state would know everyone's exact abilities and needs seeing that every individual that could work got their ideal job and whether they could work or not got every need satisfied. The workers would not need to be paid and neither would they need to buy anything. The already preexisting universal capitalist system of company towns housing workers and their families and company stores serving those towns would be used by the new state to provide the needs of the people.

The excess wealth already generated by the preceding capitalist system of the wealthy industrialized capitalist countries was seen as being more than adequate to fund the new communist system replacing it... forever.

Later Marxists like Lenin got impatient with "historical inevitability" and tried accelerating the process before all the required conditions for the collapse of capitalism could come about. We see where that got them.

Many of the conditions that Marx & Engles considered universally inevitable (e.g. company towns & stores) turned out to be only transient phenomena of the business environment of their time.