Revolutions have failed in many ways, but they have an upside: putting pressure on the elite to do something in order to maintain what they have (and to keep their heads glued to the body). Why do you think we have working rights around the world nowadays? Because a bunch of crazy people decided to fight against the prevailing status in the beginning of XX century, and even run a revolution if necessary. Nowadays people are too afraid of doing anything, this is the perfect scenario for the downward social spiral that we're seeing in the XXI century.

>Do they mean that same capitalism that brings >1,000,000 Chinese people out poverty every month?

The idea that by pointing to some successes, it justifies the whole system of appropriating labour for profit is utterly falacious and false. I hope you can see that it's not sound reasoning.

A system can have merits; Marx was very clear that Capitalism has various merits, especially over its predecessors. His idea was that there is a further reachable goal. You have made no effort to dismiss this other than by saying "what we have now is pretty ok".

>Try talking to someone who lived through one of them.

Why would their experience be relevant to reformulations in theory? To be clear, I'm not advocating for Soviet-style Communism.

> Do they mean that same capitalism that brings >1,000,000 Chinese people out poverty every month?

No, they mean the dominant economic system of the developed West in the mid-19th through early-20th century (since replaced in the developed west by the modern mixed economy which is an unstable form with a danger of reverting back to capitalism because it retains central features of capitalism.)

What China has is a transitional form that is somewhere on the map between totalitarian centralization through a kind of neofeudalism (that relates to classical feudalism in the same what that Leninist/Stalinist/Maoist totalitarianism relates to monarchic absolutism) to something like capitalism. Which is certainly progress, just as Marx recognized that the transition from.feudalism to the kind of capitalism he and other contemporary socialist critiqued was progress.

But that it is progress from something worse earlier doesn't make it the ideal end state.

> Did Mao not try hard enough?

Mao tried quite hard at completely the wrong thing. Leninism and it's descendants abandoned key tenants of Marxism to create something that either (in the overly generous view) they thought could work in very different conditions than Marx addressed or (in the more cynical view) as served as convenient propaganda for authoritarian populism in the societies in which they operated.

A word of advice: avoid the word "Marxism" like a plague. If you believe there are some good ideas hidden in it, present those ideas directly, without assigning historical credit to anyone.

Why? Marxism refers to the work of Marx and Engels, who are forefathers of the criticism of capitalism (along with other 18th century anarchists and socialists). I see no reason to get rid of the term or use other terms; I base my reasoning of Marx's work and Engels's formulations and I'll be sure to give the great men their credit.

I'm not making the case that Marxism had good ideas here, I'm making the case that Marxism had ideas that led to change in the direction it seems, without collapse, in the places where actual Marxism is a thing, and that the collapsed systems that called themselves Marxist shared a common deviation from Marxism on fundamental points stemming from their shared point of departure, Leninism.

Also, treating Marxism the way you suggest empowers the people who will use association with Marxism (which whether or not people who think Marxism had good ideas avoid the name, people who don't can still draw the connections) as an attack against an idea, leveraging the failure of Leninist societies to suggest that anything associated with Marxism is bad. So, no, I'll continue to point out that that involves not only the ad hominem fallacy, but also the fallacy of equivocation.

That kind of language policing is ridiculous. The words mean what they mean. If there is some taboo around a word like Marxism or feminism or islamism, that doesn't mean we need new words, it means there is resistance to the ideas. Over time the words depoliticize slightly and can be used freely again.

Giving in to people who are trying to cloud the meaning of words is the linguistic equivalent to negotiating with highjackers. You can do it, but you just make the job easier for the next highjacker.

I know it's a scary moment, where it feels like words have lost their meaning and insanity reigns, but that's just the zeitgeist. Words still mean things and that still had power.