Ask Lemmy

Very basically: communism is not “everyone gets paid the same” and it is not “no hierarchy ever.” You can still have inequality in income, status, or lifestyle. The core difference is where that inequality comes from.

Under communism, the means of production are collectively owned, so no one gets rich purely by owning things other people have to use to survive. You do not get passive power over others just because your parents did well or you happened to own capital first.

The baseline is that no one is excluded from basic human needs, food, housing, healthcare, education, safety. That removes the permanent underclass capitalism reliably produces. From there, differences in pay or quality of life can exist based on contribution, skill, responsibility, or scarcity, but they are not allowed to snowball into dynastic wealth and structural domination.

So yes, different jobs can lead to different standards of living. That alone is not capitalism. Capitalism specifically requires private ownership of productive assets and wage dependence. If everyone has equal access to opportunity and no one can hoard power across generations, you do not end up with the same class system we have now.

The honest answer is also the boring one: real-world implementations vary, some badly, and no system guarantees fairness automatically. Communism is about reducing structural exploitation, not pretending humans stop being human.

People saying “everyone will just do awful jobs out of pure love” are overselling it and hurting the argument. Incentives still exist. The difference is that survival is not used as the incentive.

TLDR: Capitalism uses deprivation as motivation. Communism tries to remove deprivation first, then argue about incentives afterward. Whether that succeeds is the real debate.