Communism in the USA

When I lived in Slovakia, I frequently heard the following story about life under "communism":
there was no incentive to work hard. If you worked hard you got the same rewards as someone who was lazy.

Equally, there is a problem with motivation today in the USA, though it's a slightly different problem.
You can work long hours with intensity and still get little by way of reward--aka low pay and few or no benefits.... You may have no health insurance, or once you retire you find that your retirement package has disappeared or diminished....

One's motive is not the hope of a better life, but the fear of starvation.

Not a pretty picture. You tell me that it's better than communism? No one had to fear starvation under communism.

Communism (so called) was a deeply un-egalitarian system, and therefore hypocritical in its maintenance of what Michael Albert calls a "coordinator class", but,
at least there was a material minimum below which people were not allowed to fall--and that does not exist in the land with the greatest destructive capacity in history

And, I will add as an after-thought (stimulated by something I heard a Hungarian social scientist say): those societies which we call "communist" did have a vision of a social minimum. There were some things which, simply put, every community had to have--such as a cultural center in every neighborhood, a social good available to all. I didn't live in Slovakia during communism, but I saw first hand the remnants of the old system. And people living in Eastern Europe remember this idea that every community, every neighborhood should reach a minimum level, and it influences them--especially the older part of the population. The young, by contrast, are often animated by a wholly unrealistic and unsupportable form of "market fundamentalism" and are blind to these ideas...they are, indeed, fanatical and ruthless in their devotion to this new way of getting ahead... as fanatical as perhaps another younger generation was in its pursuit of "communism".....But I hasten to add the the word "often" in that last sentence is not a sociologist's "often", the product of careful counting, but merely the expression of something I've noticed that was salient at the time....significant though its significance is not easily quantifiable...

[Perhaps the word "often" is merely an indication that the very the ruthlessness of the new believers in capitalism impressed me with their audacity and narrow single-mindedness, as if they were fleeing the past with all possible haste, not looking over their shoulders, and refusing to engage in any form of self-reflection, or hear any doubts about the direction in which they were moving.]

And that idea of a minimum level of decent life either does not exist at all or exists in an atrophied form in the USA. Individuals may have that idea, but it does not rise to a level where it actually influences social organization...Indeed the trend is currently downhill, toward a more feudal style of organization...

Note: If you asked me to support the claim that market fundamentalism is unsupportable, I might begin with citing or developing arguments in John Quiggin's Zombie Economics, Princeton UP 2010.

Complaint: No one had to fear starvation!?? But what about torture, political oppression?
Funny thing, that. I read somewhere that there has been torture in the USA, and I think I even read somewhere that someone had gotten in trouble for their political opinions too, like FBI raids early in the morning. But, then again, maybe I only imagined it.....