Lenin and Marx never discussed any such dichotomy at all, in fact they would agree that income is value neutral.

The problem for them was property relations. Wage without controlling the means of production, democratically distributed or not, alienate people from their labour.

And I know a bit about that, because I am actually a refugee from a country that does this, that has social democracy and focuses on the income approach.

And the reason why I fled is because I am Romani, and also I have a diagnosis which, under the Fabian eugenics paradigm, is considered antisocial or subhuman.

While I lived there I was segregated, assaulted by police, I was tortured for 3 days straight by doctors.

The people who I lived with, my community, were war refugees, religious minorities, Arabs and Africans. As well as elderly people who had been abandoned by their families, since that's considered a human right in the gadje world. If you have an elder you don't like, you can throw them away into some slum, nobody will stop you.

And the reason why this happens in social democracy is simple: People may have a high income, they may have tuxedo unions giving them collective bargaining, but, they have no idea what money is, or what labour is, or what income is. It's just something they use.

It's like how most people don't know how the micro transistors in their BIOS works, they just use their computer.

Problem is: You can't call a technician when your democracy breaks down and stops working.

So even though these people get equity, they also believe whatever the newspapers and schools tell them. About how protestianism brought democracy to Europe, about how Jewish citizens are disloyal, about how bringing refugees will have a "browning" and "mule effect" upon society.

And that's how you end up with ghettos and slums, and an underclass. That's why you need more than income. People can't just be democratic, it's a skill you have to learn with experience.

Until people manage their own institutions of power, in such a way as to permit them to influence the state directly, they will be like toddlers in a nursery. Just watching the TV screen, and clapping their hands when things feel exciting.

Marx and Lenin never made a moral argument about exploitation, but rather a functional one.

EDIT:

In fact, if you want a more well known example, look at the New Deal, and how it produced an era of racist extremism in the US as the baby boomer generation got unprecedented living standards. It didn’t make things better, it made them worse.

With the second wave of the Ku Klux Klan numbering in the millions, and people getting segregated, lynched, beaten and even enslaved under the 13th amendment which permits slave labour in prison. Alienated wealth actually makes society worse, the only people who benefit from it are the sort of people we enjoy watching get shot in Tarantino films.

Same thing with Israel and Saudi Arabia, both are social democratic countries, but because the population is alienated from their labour, they are shifted towards reaction, not democracy.