OP, your question is touching on a great discussion between how much of our social order is arbitrary and how much is determined by material conditions (for example: having visited Cuba, a thoroughly socialist state, I witnessed racism to about the same level as would exist in progressive communities in the US despite no capitalist relations to produce it.). The dialectic between the base and the superstructure, as a Marxist might put it.

I didn't want to muddy up my comment with a long quote, but I think this one has some nice insights.

But if reading isn't one's forte then the tl;dr is from Marx: "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please"

These are from a book called "The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy"

From a left perspective, then, the hidden reality of human life is the fact that the world doesn’t just happen. It isn’t a natural fact, even though we tend to treat it as if it is—it exists because we all collectively produce it. We imagine things we’d like and then we bring them into being. But the moment you think about it in these terms, it’s obvious that something has gone terribly wrong. Since who, if they could simply imagine any world that they liked and then bring it into being, would create a world like this one?

Perhaps the leftist sensibility was expressed in its purest form in the words of Marxist philosopher John Holloway, who once wanted to title a book, “Stop Making Capitalism.” . . . This is the ultimate revolutionary question: what are the conditions that would have to exist to enable us to do this—to just wake up and imagine and produce something else?

To this emphasis on forces of creativity and production, the Right tends to reply that revolutionaries systematically neglect the social and historical importance of the “means of destruction”: states, armies, executioners, barbarian invasions, criminals, unruly mobs, and so on. Pretending such things are not there, or can simply be wished away, they argue, has the result of ensuring that left-wing regimes will in fact create far more death and destruction than those that have the wisdom to take a more “realistic” approach.

Elements of the Right dabbled with the artistic ideal, and twentieth-century Marxist regimes often embraced essentially right-wing theories of power . . . in their obsession with jailing poets and playwrights whose work they considered threatening, they evinced a profound faith in the power of art and creativity to change the world—those running capitalist regimes rarely bothered, convinced that if they kept a firm hand on the means of productions (and, of course, the army and police), the rest would take care of itself.