On the other end, communism and anarchism etc very often downplay or completly ignore the human aspect of it, where you have people that will not work within the system. There are many other issues as well that very seldomly is spoken off.
I don't think communism or even socialism are the solutions.
Market economics allow for tremendous individual expression and development and should be retained.
The trick is to have a market economy that is not dependent on growth.
Markets with industries divided between subsistence industries(providing necessities) and expanding industries (innovating, growing).
We need to create a market economy that is based on requirements like sustainability and funding basic services for free for everyone(education, healthcare, unemployment, retirement, parental leave, etc.), if these things are met and private business can still create a successful business case, then they have a largely free market to grow into.
Secondly, we need to seriously think about value chains and how we distribute the value they create.
Currently, people happen to own value chains and become obscene rich without much or any work of their own.*
Wages are intentionally decoupled from the value chain in order for exploitation to take place. Work/wages have never been an adequate means to distribute the wealth a society creates.
Stopping obscene amounts of money to bunch up in very few hands is an integral part of protecting democracy. Money corrupts. Not only people but also institutions and systems.
In the past 40 years, ever since Neoliberal capitalism was introduced to the world, western power structures have shifted to become, in some cases(like the US) as top-heavy as they had been during times of Monarchy in Europe.
Lastly, we need to redefine prosperity around non-economic metrics. A "good life" isn't marked by owning a lot of stuff, amassing a lot of financial assets or being able to buy all the latest products.
This reductionist view of life through economic lenses is terrible.
*
Economic exploitation is a tricky thing, but I think it can be made relatively simply by putting it into numbers.
Generally speaking, you can just look at the value (profit) generated by any value chain and divide it by the employees taking part in that value chain. That gives you the degree of exploitation.
This leads you to some counterintuitive results:
For example, software developers are usually much more exploited than any other group of employees.
Software companies like EA or Activision reach similar profits as car companies like BMW, yet the employ only fraction of the people.
So while the average software employee generates 10-20 times as much profit as the average car-manufacturer employee, they only make 2-3 times as much in wages.
So the degree of exploitation is higher. Yet we don't usually see it as a problem because software developers aren't exactly poor people.
If you ask me this exposes how fundamentally irrational and unjust the way we distribute the wealth we create is.
Instead of considering value chains that operate within society, through the work of people and through the consumption by people, as the property of private owners, we should consider them societal value chains and distribute the value they create accordingly.
We are currently building up a new financial monarchy.
the solution to that isn't communism or socialism, but simply a free, individualistic society based on the values of justice and equality.
Communism works concepts of collective identity revolving around class. That is inherently toxic, like any ideology revolving around concepts of collective identity.