Marx dreamed of a world where the workers in western capitalist economies, would start a revolution and turn to communism, but that never happened.

Nearly all of the revolutions which issued and ended in communism, started in feudal or near feudal societies, mostly based on rural peasant economics, such as Tsarist Russia and Eastern Asia. And the step is clearly only a small one, changing the hierarchical structure of feudalism, for the hierarchical structure of a one party state and a command economy, not too big a leap for a society in one go.

If you turn to socialism in a reasonably democratic way, from an even half way successful economy, you usually turn to a moderate, tolerant, and culturally diverse form of democratic socialism. Hard one track communism only results from hard won, bitter and violent revolution, and to start that sort of revolution, you require, that people should be nearly starving. People will only face the fire power of the state, in violent uprising, if the choice is a truly stark one, between death for you by bullet, and death for both you and your children by starvation.

The western semi-democratic capitalist states long ago, realized that the trick to managing social injustice and maintaining the divide, between the rich exploiters and the useful poor, was to give the poor just enough to keep them just above actual starvation. So that working harder for the rich and powerful to win a slightly larger share of the hand outs, would aways seem a better way to escape poverty, than charging into the throats of machine guns. And thus a fairly large degree of social injustice, in which those who work to produce the wealth, receive far less than their earned share of it, can be maintained forever, because the cost of change in the short term is too great whatever the long term benefits.

The only way to change that, is to raise aspirations by the slow drip, drip, drip, of education and the constant democratic pressure which results, pushing society ever towards more social justice by democratic means. Which is why there is such a strong anti-education movement, pressed forward on behalf of the right wing rich elite, by those who are fooled into thinking that education is main feature of the rich exploiters, and that therefore rejecting education is equal to rejecting the rich exploiters. This is a very good trick to fool people, if you can get away with it, and it certainly does seem to work.

Communism suppressed religious tribalism and forced loyalty to the state. I think, if the USSR had gained control of Afghanistan, when it fell, like other countries under their control, that religious tribalism would have resurfaced.

And, in modern Russia what we now see is that they have realized that using their traditional Russian Orthodox religion to help control people works better than suppressing it.

I agree. The longer I live the more I see that others do interact with us but that does not mean they see things as we do or that they believe as we do. Believing otherwise is the big mistake of human kind.