If taking a human-science view, then one interesting take on capitalism is that it isn't a thing at all. It's the absence of a thing. It's a positive freedom. There can be no "science" of capitalism.

It allows the direction of excess human psychological energy. It is the absence of regulation of anti-social criminal behaviours, by creating an allowable "grey area" between moral and wicked behaviours - what so many business people like to call "amoral". But that same energy is innovative, creative - the destruction of what is old and weak is part of any finite-sized system. The need to destroy, dominate and exploit is strong in a significant percent of the population. Any decent study of criminology is continuous with "business".

William James, in The Moral Equivalent of War [0] suggested that we coped with this in the past by having every few generations of males kill each other in wars - and of course implied that it's mainly a gendered issue. During frontier times, as the European settlers conquered America and other lands, there was ample "space" for exploitation as that energy was directed against "nature" (and the indigenous folks who were considered part of "nature" as opposed to "civilisation"). Now we've run out of space. The only target left for that energy is each other.

Social-"ism" etc are projects to try controlling that nature by reducing "individualism" (and insecurity-based consumerism is an obvious first target). It's major fault is that the anti-social criminals tend be want to be the ones doing the controlling - just wearing the mask of civility and preaching the primacy of "the group".

If we cannot change human nature we must find a new outlet for that energy. Space exploration as a new frontier always looked good, but in reality it's something we are unlikely to achieve before self-destructing the technological civilisation needed to support it.

That leaves little else but a kind of cultural revolution. The pharmaceutically catalysed version of that in the 1960s is worth studying to see where and why it went wrong. See Huxley.

Any realistic systematic change would need to address this "problem" of the individual ego, creating some new focus that is the "moral equivalent" of war.

[0] http://public-library.uk/ebooks/65/5.pdf