Baraka_Guru

Capitalism is that amorphous system (or set of systems) we've built around this idea that capital (i.e. wealth/resources) is the prime mover of societies and that the holders of capital are the enablers of societies.

The nature of this system is based on the premise that capital is scarce and has a varying level of demand depending on the current status of a particular society in which a particular amount of capital operates.

Put another way, capitalism is viewed as the freest mode of socioeconomic order in that those who have capital are free to enable those who wish to use capital in exchange for any value which may (or may not) be generated by it.

That nemesis of capitalism (i.e. communism) makes the assumption that people on the individual level are either too stupid or too reckless to be permitted the level of capital required to enable society, whether this is individually or collectively, and so it is up to government to decide how capital is used and who has access to it.

Now this is not to say that capitalism is good and communism is bad. I think both are inherently amoral. I don't mean to suggest that capitalism and communism are binary opposites either. I think the opposite of communism (as we commonly know it on an operational sense) is actually laissez-faire or free-market capitalism, which in many ways is more aptly described as libertarianism or some form of anarchy, which, on a large and permanent scale, are practically impossible social states.

That said, I don't think the view of capitalism as its own stand-alone system of organizing society is a particularly useful one. Because that's not how it works. Capitalism is a method for organizing resources, which is one component of many that make up a social system. Capitalism on its own cannot survive because it's not a comprehensive social system—it is an economic one which happens to be a major competent within many social systems that have become well-established. So in a sense capitalism is made a social entity in that it is a function of society so ingrained that most cannot think of how society would function without it.

So to answer the OP, to blame something such as capitalism for financial woes would be akin to blaming democracy for political unrest. It's not the nature of the system that can be blamed so much as it is the use and/or management of that system within particular groups or sets of groups.

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Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot