> Being forced to sell your labour in order to survive
we sell our labor because we live in a complex society where our skills our specialized and our lifestyle is massively interdependent. we need to use the money abstraction to mediate trades because of our specialization and interdependency. thus we sell labor. selling labor for profit, for providing specialized services to your community, or for the pure joy of it is one thing. selling labor from a position of alienation and need for subsistence is another.
an advanced industrial economy has much more productive capacity than is needed for pure subsistence levels of existence. we could supply survival essentials to everyone in the U.S. and still be hugely in the surplus. UBI is a popular idea among economists for exactly this reason. it's a proposed solution to a major problem of distribution of wealth.
There are many valid critiques to be made of governments which have attempted to implement Communism or Socialism, I'm not here to defend them, merely to propose that their failure does not, at least necessarily, implicate Communism. Furthermore by the same logic, I cannot see why capitalism ought to be get a leash when the real world examples have consistently shown that it leads to exploitation and recklessness or active harm to the environment globally and locally, and the resulting inbalance of wealth leading to poverty.
Capitalism is no meritocracy. It's better than feudalism, and that's about it.
If comparisons are being made, they should be done so between "ideal capitalist society" and its alternatives.
Almost everyone I encounter that opposes the slide back toward 19th century capitalism from mixed economies favors maintaining mixed economies with basically capitalist property rights, with very minor additional compensatory measures to treat some of capitalism's failure modes. You can find people supporting classical utopian Marxist ideas (or the divergences from it rooted in Leninism) but they seem to be o creasingly rare even as a proportion of critics.of capitalism.