What is the incentive to try and advance yourself mentally and occupationally in a Communist country, i.e., a country with strong principles of wealth redistribution?
Your statement above has a contradiction in it that renders it a bit ridiculous. Communist countries do not redistribute wealth, they appropriate it. Every one that has ever existed has always amassed huge quantites of wealth at the expense of its citizenry.
Socialist (or better named, "Social-Democratic") governments like Sweden do re-distribute wealth and there is much advantage to such systems. No communist state in Europe, Asia, the Americas or Africa has ever re-distributed the wealth it has seized from it own population.
That said, what is the incentive to try and advance yourself mentally or occupationally in a communist country? Virtually none. The communist education systems of Eastern Europe were almost exclusively focused on vocation; we had to take two subjects in university - often completely unrelated - just so post-graduation job placement was easier. Technically, one didn't have to take the job offered by the system after school but not to do so was vocational suicide - though some got through the cracks. I recall several car mechanics outside Warsaw in the 1980s who had PhDs in literature but were able to make more money fixing foreign imported cars (owned mostly by the upper echelons of the PZPR/Party) than working in the university. All jobs - ALL! - required certification of some sort. Food market shelf cashiers, interior designers, truck drivers, postal workers, waitresses, department store clerks - all needed certification. This meant that while in the West your waitress in a restaurant might be a student paying for her rent or an oldr retired person making extra money, in Communist Eastern Europe was doing the job they would always have until their death. Almost no hope for advancement, no chance to change vocations - you were locked in. This explains the phenomenally bad service in the communist countries. This also reveals the glaringly obvious inefficiency of such a system, and why almost everyone (including most Party members) had to work and deal secretly on the black market for basic necessities. This is why when the Soviet Army crossed the Pruth River into Romania in 1944, Stalin had to send special political commissars to explain to the troops why poor, backward and impoverished Romania - one of the poorest states of Europe then - had a countryside brimming with food production and the cities (even during the war) had shops full of food and luxuries. This was a sight no Russian had seen since before World War I. During Stalin's day, the Leninist principal was to keep workers as close to subsistance level as possible. Workers only a few steps away from starvation are less able to protest or resist the regime, and it costs the state less to keep them. Despite communist propaganda, the workers' living standard is not important to the state, only their productivity - because in communist societies, the state is the alpha and the omega.
Because like all dictatorships the communist regimes feared intellectuals, who could organize effective opposition to the regime, the communists of Eastern Europe leveled the pay scale for intellectual jobs. For example, when I was a translator at the government press agency, those of us who translated news stories between Polish, English, Russian, German, French, etc. were paid exactly the same as the old women (4 of us, 6 of them) who would take our completed computer print-outs in a cart downstairs on the elevator. We had university degrees, they none - but we all made the same money. At least they were nice, and they constantly kept my tea glass full.
Because of a medical university nearby in my own university days we had constant contact with students from all over the Third world, and I recall one evening in particular when several had a discussion with some Laotians and Vietnamese, and we came to the conclusion that the system was more or less the same there.
I've said it a million times and I'll say it again - communism doesn't work. It has been tried by people in several societies and has failed miserably, causing misery and death in its path.
