In his essay The Economics of Climate Change, Noam Chomsky says, while discussing essential strategies to bolster functioning democracies
A longer-term goal is to win the educational and cultural battle that’s been waged with such bitterness in the one-sided class war. It means tearing down the enormous edifice of delusions about markets, free trade, and democracy that’s been assiduously constructed over many years, and to overcome the marginalization and atomization of the public.
It is indeed a valid and sufficient goal for a labour centric study of economics to shed light on the assumptions underlying the notions of inevitability and benignity of the Capitalistic enterprise. Amartya Sen has said that there is no positivist economics. Economists must choose intentionally the moral goals for the world economic order and from there model economically sound mechanisms that may be useful in guiding the invisible hand in that moral direction.
For me, this harkens back to lyrics from the song Epitaph of progressive rock band King Crimson:
Knowledge is a deadly friend
If no one sets the rules
The fate of all mankind I see
Is in the hands of fools
The antidote to runaway capitalism is unlikely to be socialism (or any other -ism). Rather, economists can help understand the stakeholders and the stakes that drive the overall implicit and post-hoc system goals of the world economy and develop means to guide these goals in directions determined by humanitarian considerations.