Karl Marx called it dialectic materialism, ongoing class conflict resulting in the destruction of the capitalist class in favor of the proletariat. In the process of destroying social classes in favor of one communist social class, capitalists are to be eliminated. Stalin favored extermination of the bourgeois class of capitalist upstarts in order to bring about a new social order, or communism. He exterminated several million Russians in order to bring about equality, which, of course, never happened. You can’t change human nature. Cuba is undergoing devastating damage from the many decades of communism. The communist assumption of equality defies human nature. Marx was a genius idiot. He assumed an equalitarian society of one social class would fulfill people’s needs. In reality, a one party society violates individual freedom to pursue one’s own destiny based on what is best for each individual.
Where do you find equality in the real world? Conduct social science experiments and you will find no person equal to another. Life is like a track race. Put everyone on the starting line, and then watch the results, there are winners and losers. Lying about the results violates human needs. If you want to be entirely accurate, people are motivated to gain recognition for competent role outcomes. If you allocate social and economic rewards based on arbitrary rules as prescribed by one government party (Communist), you violate natural social processes leading to social recognition for competence. By not allowing people to run the race, a great injustice is committed. It violates natural processes by preventing individuals to pursue their own needs.
If equality is an illusion, then we in the West are the bigger propagators of it than the communists.
But it's not entirely true that there was no competition whatsoever. Obviously, people had to compete for position within their own profession. Engineers, scientists, doctors, lawyers, etc. - all had to compete to get into their respective schools, work to earn their degree, and compete with other individuals/peers to work their way up the ladder - not much different than people working in any US corporation. Those who didn't have the aptitude for higher learning could still be useful in other jobs.
On the other hand, regardless if one is a top scientist or a lowly street sweeper, they both have comparable needs. Both need to eat approximately the same amount. Both need shelter and a place to sleep - and unless one is of a larger species or something, neither would need more living space than the other. There's no particular logical or natural reason that one would have to eat more or have more stuff than the other. That doesn't mean that people aren't allowed to "run the race" and get their reward for winning. People can get their blue ribbon or gold medal or whatever it is that makes them feel good, but at the end of the day, there's no reason to have such economic disparities.
As for natural processes, that's pretty much all any of us has to deal with. One can say that everything is a "natural process," so there's no possible way that anyone can "violate" it, since the very act of "violation" would also be a "natural process." Humans kill each other all the time. We don't just run races with each other. Killing is natural, and war is the ultimate competition among humans. It's what we do. And for much of human history, war has dominated every age, for right or wrong. But I think a major turning point came during the industrial revolution, along with the accompanying advancements in the technologies and tools of war.
World War I was also a major turning point, especially for Russia. Millions of troops dying in what seemed like a pointless, misguided war, and the Tsarist government was mismanaging things so badly - and they were losing on all fronts. Troops were deserting by the thousands; they just couldn't take it anymore. It also took a very heavy toll on the Western Front as well. The results may have been what fed the early attraction towards communism, since the devastation and death brought about by that war caused many to believe that war itself has to end, that we need a more cooperative world where resources can be shared in peace. It was believed that the upper classes were using workers and peasants as pawns in their wars, so the idea that all the workers of the world laying down their arms and uniting together in peace and cooperation wouldn't have seemed all that bad at the time. Maybe it was naive, but considering how much they had gone through, I can see how some would want to find better ways for humanity to live.
In the West, I think we basically agreed with the idea of peace and cooperation, which is what inspired the League of Nations. But most in the West did not favor going to the extreme of forming an international communist society, which is what many of the early communists envisioned. They thought that there would be revolutions cropping up in other countries as well, which did happen to some degree, but not in the direction the Bolsheviks might have expected. Nationalism was also very strong, particularly in Germany where there was fear of communism and the Soviet Union, and this was a factor in Hitler's rise to power.
In Russia, they also had the problem of rebuilding after WW1 and the civil war which followed, and Lenin's approach was to implement the new economic policy which allowed for some measure of capitalism, profit, and private ownership. The idea was that Russia was still too agrarian, and its industries had not developed as far as in the West. So, the goal was to try to catch up with the West and advance their industries and infrastructure, but in a somewhat gradual and incremental way. That was the main problem they faced, which was obviously driven home in WW1, when their lack of industries and poor railroad system severely hampered their ability to wage a modern war against the Germans.
