What world are you living in? If capitalism rewarded people for how critical their jobs actually were, teachers wouldn't be making minimum wage and needing to take multiple jobs to make ends meet. And according to COVID, delivery workers, supermarket employees, restaurant workers, etc, would all be rich seeing as they were deemed essential workers. Pretty sure there weren't any CEOs deemed essential workers.

Are you trying to say that you are ok with people working a full time job and not being able to afford to live in the place where they work? It strikes me as a bit silly that you expect people to still do those jobs if it doesn't pay enough to make it worth it. The real fault lies in the companies and corporations taking in record profits but "can't afford" to increase wages because it'll cut into their margins by .01%.

Wealth gaps do not motivate anyone to grind and investing money you can't spare is not a feasible option to escape poverty.

The American Dream where all you needed was hard work and determination and you could buy a house, support your family, and live well, is dead. There are families with 2 adults working 2 or 3 jobs that still need financial assistance in order to afford food or rent. They're definitely on the grind but that doesn't work anymore. Now people grind just to survive while the wealthy do nothing and watch their bank accounts overflow.

The difference between the reality now and 30 years ago is the corporations got greedier and focused their energy on squeezing every cent they could out of their workers and their customers to live their own pockets. This is the reality of unregulated capitalism. It's a fight for the bottom in terms of quality and a race to the top in regards to prices. The only thing that matters is profit above all else.

In this system, the rich control the "capitalism" and choose who the "rewards" go to. Profits go way up and CEO pay has increased 400% while the worker's wages have remained the same. They're doing stock buy backs and lining their own pockets while their employees need second jobs and food stamps to live.

You're defending a system that constantly looks for new ways to fuck you over if it makes an extra penny. You need to reevaluate your whole schema

Communism simply represents any societal system of workers directly controlling enterprise, instead of its being controlled by private owners.

When enterprise is privately controlled, wage remuneration to workers is resolved entirely by the profit motive of private owners.

The employment relationship carries no deeper motive or essential virtue, as you have suggested. It embodies no natural directionality that "takes into account uniqueness, results, and innovation".

Under private enterprise, all is subsumed under profit, and all that is not profitable is discarded.

When workers control enterprise, they may distribute the value of their product however they choose. No power prevents them from ascribing value to the attributes you have identified as meaningful.