I do not assume that people mean "if we only removed capitalism, everything would be fine" when they say "capitalism is the problem." I assume they mean something more like "replacing capitalism with [y] would make things much better than marginal changes to capitalism" where [y] is probably democratic socialism, or that they mean something like "most problems can be traced back to capitalism and to fix these problems we need to fix capitalism" where "fixing capitalism" means enacting whatever policies the speaker happens to advocate for.

Someone saying "it would be better if the US adopted a government closer to the USSR's" is a pretty out there statement and I'm not going to assume that someone means that unless they're pretty clear about it.