... and that, is actually what I've deduced Marx meant by Communism.
Marx wrote that advanced capitalism would lead to widespread automation of production, making labor obsolete, and that this would lead to a situation where nobody needs to work. At this point, goods would no longer be allocated on a "work done" basis, because such a basis wouldn't make any sense, any more than it would make sense for New York to shift to a "conch shell based economy" similar to historic pacific islands.
From this understanding, you can see that "communist nations" had it backwards. A communist nation guaranteed 100% employment, and prevented your job being automated. e.g. it froze labor relations in time. Thus actually preventing the very conditions Marx talked about that would be necessary for a Communist Economy.
Also, Marx's theory was Historical Materialism, he wrote that phases of economic growth follow each other out of necessity. e.g. it was a given that it would evolve from feudalism -> mercantilism -> capitalism. Marx said that Socialism would inevitably arise out of the conflicts in capitalism, and we do in fact see the most advanced economies moving towards social democracy. And that communism would be a state after this in which automation frees us from labor, and we allocate based on need. If you automate a modern society then expand welfare or put minimum basic income in place, you have virtually the exact thing Marx said would happen to capitalism.
Thus the development from one stage to the next is not about choices or singular events, but about tipping points where one system inevitably phases out another.