The majority of human history takes place in the mode of production of the hunter-gatherer society. This is before the agricultural revolution and the advent of agricultural civilization.
Economists describe this as early communism. The definition of this model is based in large part on the study of the Iroquois Confederacy. This, along with evolutionary models of food sharing, highlight a meat sharing system that is enforced communally. There is personal property, but private ownership of land and essential resources is nonexistent. The community owns the means of production as well as essential resources, and they dictate their distribution by need and not by profit.
In modern society, this would manifest as collective ownership of the means of production by the working class. The means of production are capital that is used to produce goods. Land, water, corporations, factories, etc. As workers exist worldwide, collective ownership would take the form of a global socialist state owned by the workers. This is the purpose of the world revolution.
As communities become organized around sustainability using vast amounts of capital created by workers under capitalism, the global state becomes redundant. At this stage, the economic structure returns to its original state, which is communism.
It's not a ideological debate, calling someone Marxist is as redundant as calling a physicist a Newtonian or a mathematician a Pythagorean. Capitalism itself as we know it was defined by that era of economic science. Of course we should remain skeptical and critical, as many ideas from that era turned out to be wrong. What's difficult is constantly working against decades of Cold War era propaganda and disinformation.
The primary American defense against the words socialism or communism is the idea that society is somehow built around personal character flaws and not laws of economic and political science. The capitalist is not inherently greedy, he simply follows the forces of economics. Communism is not some "ideal society" that works on paper but is undermined by human greed. It describes the majority of human history, and it requires a world revolution to exist again. Any nation that describes itself as "socialist" yet participates in the global economy is simply capitalist and masquerading as something else.