There’s a phenomenon in psychology called “crowding out”, where extrinsic motivators (e.g money) can destroy intrinsic motivators (e.g passion), because they’re more important (you need money to survive, you don’t need passion).

The take that communism is bad for incentives and capitalism is good for incentives is far too naive. What capitalism can do effectively is make a large mass of people do a lot of work they don’t want to do, and turn work they do want to do into a nightmare, where communism would instead focus on reducing the overall burden of unpleasant work, and find non-market solutions for distributing the unpleasant work.

Automating the bad away then becomes a positive instead of an existential threat to our existence. Many other contradictions of capitalism fall away when we look towards non-capitalists modes of production.

A lot of people frame non-market solutions as “compulsory”, and market solutions as “free”, even though again that’s far too reductive, having the choice between starving and janitorial work isn’t really a good faith choice, and yet these are the kinds of choices capitalism uses and calls the epitome of freedom.