> Russia ... China ...
IIRC, those "solutions" weren't his. They were dictatorships that took up central planning with a veneer of Marx.
> China now seems to have something that works, after a long painful period of Maoism.
Contemporary China has nothing to do with Marxism. It's basically an oligarchical state with its own business interests that rules over a capitalist economy.
Care to elucidate? My understanding it that only seems to be true if you exclusively argue from the examples of historical 20th-century regimes that labeled themselves "communist," but that's flawed perspective.
Whether it is technical, legal or political (or all of the above) differs.
Russia tried Lenin’s solutions, which are both different from and applicable to different problems than Marx’s.
Marx’s solution to a precapitalist economy like Tsarist Russia would be...capitalism.
More precisely, the next step in Marx's model toward the Communist end state would be capitalism, not socialism.
But maybe that was just Russia. Since 1900, Russia has had an emperor, liberal communism, dictatorial communism, bureaucratic communism, liberal democracy, oligarchic plutocracy, and capitalist dictatorship. None worked all that well.
China now seems to have something that works, after a long painful period of Maoism.