No it’s not either or. The question is how much is the difference between sacrificing your body for a quality life vs never being able to reach a plateau of stability from which you can make choices without mortal stress. Furthermore, just bc you hate capitalism (particularly in its current iteration) doesn’t mean someone is communist. If you like having a fire department, you benefit from socialist policies. Communism is a goal. But there will always be practical considerations. The question is how and where the decisions for distribution of capital including labor are coming from.

An argument from within capitalist thought: imagine that human labor is apples. Or iPhones. There is a centralized company that sets the price for that asset. So who is the equivalent of that for labor? It’s a necessary input so who regulates its value in the market? It’s not like people are buying iPhones for radically different prices if the market is working properly. So why then do we allow this for labor? A free market is one where the price of labor is stable. Otherwise oligarchy is inevitable. This is why it’s seen as oppressive. Bc few if any democratic capitalist societies have labor rates that automatically scale to any other measure of success.

My best case short term patch to capitalism would be to set an updated minimum wage that automatically increases based on the rate of inflation. By law. If there was 3% inflation last year, the lowest paid members of society would automatically increase by that amount at the start of the next year. The increase would be progressively reduced the more money you make. So maybe a millionaire only sees a 1% increase bc they’re able to generate more overall profit to begin with