Capitalism has been around for a much shorter time than feudalism, and feudalism took hundreds of years to be fully overtaken. Imagine being a 14th century peasant saying “man, it looked like feudalism was declining for a bit there, but I’ve spent my entire life (30 years) waiting for it to collapse and it’s still here, so I guess it must be the natural order after all.”

China still lasts…

What we have now is potential revolutionary energy…

Setbacks and temporary failures are not indicative of a permanent failure. The capitalists are obviously going to swing back. But ultimately the people punch harder

It scarcely needs proof that there is not the slightest possibility of carrying out these tasks in a short period, of accomplishing all this in a few years. Therefore, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the transition from capitalism to communism, must not be regarded as a fleeting period of “super-revolutionary” acts and decrees, but as an entire historical era, replete with civil wars and external conflicts, with persistent organisational work and economic construction, with advances and retreats, victories and defeats.

The historical era is needed not only to create the economic and cultural prerequisites for the complete victory of socialism, but also to enable the proletariat, firstly, to educate itself and become steeled as a force capable of governing the country, and, secondly, to re-educate and remould the petty-bourgeois strata along such lines as will assure the organisation of socialist production.

– Stalin

I think it’s fair to say most people expected capitalism to collapse sooner, but the overall trajectory seems to be precisely as Lenin predicted. Global capitalism is currently in a historic crisis, meanwhile China is going from strength to strength. USSR was the very first attempt at socialism, and unfortunately it was eventually overthrown, but we have to always keep the long view when thinking about these things.