I'll throw a spanner into the works, but to begin with I don't hear people talking about this in church. I'm Catholic, and Catholics don't generally wander down eschatological rabbit holes. It tends to be a Protestant phenomena.
Having said that I believe the Mark of the Beast will be a silicon chip which can be implanted in hand or forehead, "without which no-one could buy or sell". That's the key criteria.
We're not far from that now, with some people having medical implants and others having chips which can open doors and so on. The world wide web is gradually making cash redundant, and "they" know exactly where and when you spent your money, how much you've got in the bank etc.
If AI can pin point almost any information we request in a matter of seconds, keeping track of our transactions would be childs play.
I don't think we can necessarily lump that in with communism. It is the capitalist west which has most strongly engineered this development.
My late presbyterian pastor, whom I often quote, was conservative to his bootlaces. I doubt if he ever voted ALP in his life (Australian Labor Party, probably close to the Democrats in ethos).
Yet he said to me once in the privacy of his office "I think Communism was God's idea, given through a Jew." Then he quoted "From every man according to ability; to every man according to need." He continues "It's got a Biblical ring about it!"
He added "But the devil got hold of it first! You'd never get the churches to believe in it now!"
At it's core it was meant to be a system for the egalitarian distribution of goods in an industrial society. But the hardline Bolsheviks won through, led by Lenin and later Stalin. The devil got his men in place and his work followed - purges, violent revolution everywhere, the NKVD andn KGB, the gulags, milliions murdered in the Soviet Union, in the East, in Cambodia and the killing fields.
The devil got hold of it first. But because the Americans, who as a people are independent to their core, were the most involved in fighting the Cold War and proxy hot wars (Korea, Vietnam, Cuban missile crisis), communism was labelled as evil in its own right.
The devil discredited it through his human agents.