Sigh. Sorry to be rude, but I'm not sure if you properly read my post - it really wasn't a "diatribe[s] about a shadowy conspiracy of a 1% elite spanning centuries".
I wasn't referring to you when I indicated that some conclude that the system is "as good as uncorrupted and can't be improved", nor was I suggesting that you subscribe to "the idea that any kind of social improvement inevitably leads to some kind of totalitarianism". In both cases I was speaking about the opinions I encounter in this debate more generally.
As to the point you make in your second paragraph; it strikes me that the improvement in living standards is more to do with improvements in technology and political freedom than it is to do with the way our economy is organised. The idea that we owe these improvements to the economic structure is, however, prevalent; sometimes the idea is modified to say that the technological advancement we have enjoyed would have been impossible without the economic system we have.
Both forms of this idea fail to recognise that there have been numerous burst of technological and social advancement that haven't relied upon capitalism (e.g. the Romans, but also basically every civilisation in history), unless of course you broaden the definition of capitalism so much to include almost any commercial system, and both fail to offer evidence that capitalism was causal of, rather than merely temporally correlated with, the improvements in living standards. The negative evidence available, about systems which have historically been anti-correlated with progress (like the ones you mentioned), only covers a narrow range of possibilities, and are difficult to generalise from.
I should note that I'm strongly inclined to believe that there was a causal link between capitalism and the success of the industrial revolution and the things that followed (i.e. it was sufficient), but I am far less convinced that the form of capitalism used, which strongly concentrated power, was necessary, and I think that it is deleterious to broader society.
I, like you, "prefer the gradual, consensual move to socialism we have in Western Europe". This is a sentiment I agree with wholeheartedly, and I find these ideas of conspiracy very boring, but I'm still wary of the notion that we should pretend that no one has an interest in concentrating power and wealth, and maintain the status quo. My reading of history, and the present, is that people do have such interests, and that they use both their power and their wealth to secure their positions. I fail to see why this is particularly controversial, except that it suggests moral culpability for actions that have, for a long time, been lauded.
I can see that you are not arguing to maintain the status quo, but I hope you recognise that the greater social justice in modern capitalism, which is constantly under attack from the right, was fought for over long periods. The rights we enjoy today were not given to us by the benevolence of our leaders.
Sorry for the long post! ;-)