Capital is not created by capitalists. Capitalists are created by capital. As soon as peasants and petty producers begin to produce commodities, a process is set in place, whereby competition between them arises. In previous times, this results in some of them being reduced to slavery, but when the historical conditions develop, so that sizeable markets, in towns, for some types of commodities, develop, it instead results in the means of production of some becoming capital, whilst the others become wage labourers. This is not a matter of a subjective desire of the individual peasant to get rich. It is just a simple fact that, in order to sell their commodities, so as to get the other commodities they require for their consumption, or to get money to pay taxes, they must be able to produce those commodities at least as cheaply as all other producers. But, some will have natural advantages, which is a direct consequence itself of material conditions.
In the same way that, under different conditions, either a lighter or darker moth is better adapted, so too, here, some are better adapted to these new material conditions than others. Some will have better land, some will be more adept at producing certain commodities and so on. As a consequence, as a market value is established for each type of commodity, so some producers will produce at an individual value below it, and some above it. The former will accumulate money, the latter will gradually find they must borrow money, then leading to them going into debt, and then losing their means of production. Even before that, they will have to get the money they require by selling their labour for part of the week. They will sell it to the richer peasants and commodity producers, who now have surplus money to hire this labour, as well as to buy additional and better means of production. The surplus money they accumulated becomes capital not out of any conscious design on their part, but as part of a natural process of social evolution.
As Marx says, in his comment above in Theories of Surplus Value, Chapter 9, this is simply a matter of certain individuals being able to take advantage of the given material conditions, because they are best adapted to those conditions. As Lenin says, in response to the Narodniks subjectivist analysis of the development of the Russian bourgeoisie, as comprising people who were cheats, and so on, it is not these characteristics that causes capitalism to develop, but the development of capital itself, which enables such people, particularly in its earliest manifestations, to prosper. It is those characteristics that best enables capital to grow more rapidly, by extracting the greatest amounts of profit.
And, once this section of society does begin to prosper, it then has access to all of those things that the previous ruling class was able to utilise. It sends its children to school, and to University; those children, become writers, and teachers, and university professors, as well as civil servants, lawyers, judges and so on. All of the ideas that flow from a bourgeois lifestyle, and bourgeois production now colour all aspects of life from literature, and culture to science and law. It is by these means that capital not only creates capitalists, but it creates the ruling ideas of the age.
Society and history is driven forward by real individuals, but the ideas in the heads of these individuals are by no means simply accidental or arbitrary, or the product of some rational thought process, separated from reality, but are themselves the product of the experiences of those individuals of real life, of the material world in which they exist. The state, as the instrument of the ruling class is itself, made up of such individuals, and the ideas in their heads, are likewise, thereby, the ideas of this ruling class. The combination of capital as the dominant form of property, along with the development, on the basis of it, of a capitalist class, and the development, therefrom, of a state comprised of individuals, themselves imbued with the ideas of this capitalist class, is what comprises the capitalist mode of production itself.
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