Well, without getting into a huge socialist critique of capitalism, and trying to summarize almost two hundred years of communist thought, let's look at a hypothetical, involving the question at hand, automation and robotics. Under a capitalist system, when automation occurs, removing a worker from a job, that worker is out on the street. Until he or she can find another job, he or she is impoverished. Under a purely capitalist system, that is the end of the story. Under the U.S. and many other western countries bastardized semi socialist systems, there are some social service programs in place to provide some support for them. (Unemployment insurance etc.) However these are generally only temporary, stop- gap measures, until the person can find another job.

In recent years, when american lose high paying factory jobs, either to automation or to the jobs being exported over seas, they have resorted to lower paying service jobs.

What will happen however, when the service jobs become automated as well? Once it becomes affordable enough, these jobs will go the way of the factory worker as well. Because of the profit motive and the competitive nature of the market, when it becomes affordable enough to replace these workers with robots, companies will do it in order to remain competitive.

The end product of total automation under socialism or capitalism will at first blush appear identical. There will be a wealth owning class who have all of their needs met by the work of robots. However, under capitalism that class will be a relatively tiny one, whose membership is defined by ownership of stocks and money, while the majority are condemned to a life of unemployment and poverty. Robotic police will keep the starving masses at bay. (This poverty may be alleviated somewhat by social support systems culled from the sympathy and leavings of the capitalists, but as long as their wealth is dependent upon profit, such a system will be unstable. Too many people dependent on too little profit.)

Under socialism, this class will be large and include everyone, whose membership is defined by being human. Their wealth will not be defined by profit (an ultimately intangible and unreliable substance, of which capitalism can never get enough ) but by production, which is concrete and dependable, and can be defined and limited by real human needs and wants, not by the demands of the market.

Remember, the robots are coming. The decision to make now is whether they will usher in a an era of universal prosperity, or near universal suffering. Full automation declares the end of the worker. Will that end come through lifting them up to a higher class, or through their extermination by starvation and repression?