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No, that's not it at all -- it's a failure to understand the extent to which human social reality is *irrational*. Marxism actually has a very sophisticated, Hegelian-derived understanding of capitalism as a form of rationality which tore through and destroyed traditional authoritative status relations, replacing them with market relations and 'free labor.' All of human society becomes a subject to be calculated and exploited for quantified profit.
Marxism *applauds* capitalism for doing so. Marxism *recognizes* that capitalism erodes and destroys nasty archaic status distinctions, such as race and patriarchal family structure, replacing them with exploitable labor drones. So the fact that capitalism inherently attacks the child-producing nuclear family, and inherently breaks down racism, inherently fights for free labor markets (including killing off slavery), and the destruction of national sovereignty, is something that Marxism understands. Marxism does not exalt traditional social relations, which it sees as nasty power-laden yuckiness. It tries to be hyper progressive and reason-centered.
So then wtf is bad about capitalism by Marxist lights? Simple, the capitalist rationality inevitably accrues greater and greater exploitation profits to a smaller and smaller number. It has an inner logic of profiting from labor that cannot be controlled by ordinary political means. This enmiserates the workers. And because capitalism cannot control itself, from a game theory perspective, it will collapse in worker-led revolution, the inevitable evolution of reason in the logic of material history.
Marxism thus theoretically agrees that capitalism destroyed feudalism and slavery (btw, there's a simple control for how much longer slavery would have lasted in the South without the Civil War -- the other great New World chattel slavery nation, Brazil, hardly lasted any longer than the South, and slavery collapsed in Brazil without a horrific civil war). Capitalism displaced slavery across the entire Western hemisphere with tremendous speed. Also it breaks down gender lines, since capital inherently wants to exploit female labor within the capitalist labor markets.
So why the popular perception that capitalism is associated with reinforcing traditional status relations? Partly it stems from post-Marx history, in which fascism is seen as a form of last-gasp capitalism defending itself against the triumph of communism. Basically the idea is that capitalism needs reactionary ideals in the same way the standard leftist narrative argues that modern exploitative American capitalism is premised on *racism and reactionary conservative sentiment*, and this allows capitalism to beat off socialism. Not because it wants to. But because capitalism has to ally with these traditional status structures in order to fend off rising class consciousness.
So I don't really think the Marxist problem is quite a matter of thinking capitalism is irrational in an absolute sense, so much as it is a matter of overestimating the degree to which rationalist capitalism runs out of control and enmiserates the masses, as well as overestimating the degree to which the deletion of traditional status relations and traditional forms of human sentiment will be replaced by a 'rational perception of true class interest' -- the theory of 'true class interest' tends to be awesomely shallow and fanciful, as well as pervaded by corrupt Animal Farm type interests that go unacknowledged by their purveyors. And this is where the counter-Enlightenment thinkers love to beat the shit out of the Enlightenment guys, from a philosophical perspective. It's why Stirner pissed Marx off so badly.
