But capitalism was. Some things are new, because everything changes when you have a system which is based on the accumulation, production and consumption of abstracted labor-time. So the same set of forms could suddenly generate a new content - e.g. Roman law could provide some of the forms for Enlightenment jurisprudence, etc.
Capital has a bizarre relationship to the past. It endlessly refunctions bits and pieces of the precapitalist world, but the price for this is that those bits and pieces get flattened out, integrated into the totality. Which is why it's worth studying and appreciating precapitalist cultures - they often say things and think things which capitalized societies have forgotten, or don't dare to utter. (Cue to Zizek on theology...)
-- DRR