The "realities of mankind" are that everyone has base needs. Communist societies simply attempt to address those needs through expenditures of social capital from the masses to those who go without. It's an economic philosophy, attempting to "smooth out" inequalities only go so far as the base economic needs of disaffected populations. That's the entire basis of a Communist society, so i'm finding it extremely hard to understand how you can say that Communism fails to address it. If anything, the profit motive (the basest element of Capitalist philosophy), ignores the needs of the individual in favor of the needs of the corporation. As we're seeing now, when the scales are tipped too far in favor of the corporation (wage suppression, automation, at-will employment) you risk alienating workers, which pushes them toward egalitarian philosophies like Communism. Capitalism takes this inequality as a necessary result of a system where the "wheat is separated from the chaff", Communist societies understand that there's more than enough to go around, it's just a matter of how to allocate it. You'd be hard pressed to say that command economies don't work when all inputs are available, so why is it so hard all of a sudden when you attach the name Communism to it?
This is abundantly clear when we discuss automation with respect to low paying, working class jobs. You guys say "fuck em all" for wanting a living wage and replace them with robots. As capitalists, you're well within your right to do so. However, for those of us not so attached to capitalist dogma, we see the storm brewing on the horizon for those disaffected workers as they're increasingly drawn toward Marxist philosophy. That's why Communism is being more accepted, our emphasis on "more and more productivity" while fucking over workers is pushing our economics left at an alarming pace. Keep alienating workers, and 'all of a sudden' (to you), you're going to have a problem on your hands.
I don't really recognize myself as a "capitalist" so you're barking at the wrong tree here. I'm looking at a future beyond crude capitalism as we know it. A future where we, hopefully, aspire to compete with one another over matters more meaningful than merely "capital".
Nonetheless, with the capitalist system, we have a system in place which can be developed into something. A society which encourages innovation, competitive drive and individualism, where individuals have incentive to better themselves, rather than to rest on their laurels, and collect checks that better men than themselves have earned, and shared with them, out of pity, or compassion, or, in most cases, due to law enforcement.
A society that is built upon capitalist foundations, is going to find itself developing much, much further, in the coming centuries. A society that is built upon satisfying people's "base needs" and imposing equality, is going absolutely nowhere. We have already seen this, I do not see any reason why we should see it again. Marx's ideas were influenced by his own personal short-comings, as a man, as a father, as a provider, an utter failure of a man in most regards, and he created a "fantasy" ideal, an "escape" from our world's often harsh realities, knowing it would appeal to many of his kind. But even he knew that it was nothing more than fantasy, a construct created by a clever man, to satisfy his psychological need for an alternative reality.
Rather than reviving the dead ideal of a man who himself came to despise it and its followers, what we ought to be concerned with, is how to build upon the capitalist model in a way which allows fair and just competition all across the board, without discrimination and obstacles. Instead of destroying the effective (but incomplete) model and replacing it with the perhaps emotionally comforting, but physically crippling fantasy land of "communism", we should seek to enhance what we already have, which has clearly functioned in our behalf, as we can attest to at this very moment, sitting on our computers, or smart phones in hand, for some. Communist experiments and their required mass production, are only enabled by capitalist innovations somewhere else. By itself, the model cannot continue to be sustained. Communism can only work "hand-in-hand" with a capitalist society, offering its workers as cheap productive labour for capitalist innovators, like China.