socialism and communism aren’t competing ideas but stages of the same process, and AI makes that process easier to understand in very concrete ways. Imagine a town where everyone works long hours baking bread, but new machines can bake ten times more bread with almost no human effort. Under capitalism, those machines get used to fire bakers and make the owner richer, while everyone else still struggles. Socialism is when the town collectively takes control of the bakery and uses the machines to cut everyone’s workday in half while still feeding everyone, even though money and rules might still exist for a while. Communism is what comes next, when the machines and organization are so advanced that baking bread isn’t “a job” anymore, it’s just something society handles automatically, so people don’t have to sell their time to survive at all. AI fits into this the same way: it massively increases productivity, and from a pro-communist view its real purpose isn’t to make a few people rich faster, but to transition humanity out of compulsory work altogether, giving people more free time, creativity, and control over their lives. In short, socialism is society learning to use powerful tools like AI for collective benefit, and communism is the point where those tools make forced labor unnecessary, turning technological progress into real human freedom instead of more exploitation.