I don’t know if I necessarily agree with eye for an eye mentality, but risk of prison or enough money that it makes you actually consider your decisions, seems like a better path. The goal being that it is enough so that it cannot and should not be planned for and can’t be covered by insurance or similar.
I agree with wanting stronger action, but incremental change isn't incompatible with revolutionary vision. We can say, "Yes, this is a good move, and I still want the other 99% of the work done." It is likely that at some point we'd have to move faster than 1% at a time, but it's easier to get up to speed when you're already moving vs standing still.
It can certainly exacerbate it. I'm less sure about creation; Tsarist Russia was not a nice place for anyone but the aristocracy, and life was also highly precarious in China before Mao came along - the Taiping Rebellion is estimated to have killed as much as 10% of the population, while China's population grew close to 50% during Mao's tenure despite the death of tens of millions from starvation.
I'm not communist, but it has arguably been a good fit for underdeveloped agrarian societies that feel a strategic need to industrialize rapidly without giving up political/industrial autonomy.
