The other side of this problem is that most attempts so far at actually getting rid of capitalism end up being pretty horrific, and then end up back at roughly the same place anyway, but with more autocracy because people will be rightfully pissed off about having violent revolution imposed on their otherwise decent lives.

The reality is that capitalist forces are a byproduct of scarcity and economic complexity. As long as you have these things you will have something resembling capitalism. You can call it something different but you’ll still just be meditating scarcity via a monetary proxy in some form or another.

This is the biggest thing orthodox/ML socialists really hate to acknowledge, but there is about a century of hindsight and academic thought which builds on Marx, mostly coming to a similar conclusion. It’s extremely bizarre and frustrating to hear MLs reject entire libraries of reformed socialism outright, seemingly because it doesn’t route through violence, and for me at least, it really says a lot about what their real priorities are.