A democratically-controlled economic system.

Working people must set their sights on the real goal, liberation from wage slavery. The genuine socialist movement must educate its fellow-workers to the need of reaching this goal if they are to achieve the economic security and well-being they seek. Capitalism has substituted the motive of private profit in place of public duty. Capitalism is a system of social advancement based on individual merit and ability is the message that an army of media and academic errand boys are constantly trying to drill into our heads. That message is everywhere. You can hardly escape from it. There is just one problem with this picture. An examination of how capitalism actually works - who does the work, who gains the wealth and how that wealth is accumulated - reveals a reverse reality. Capitalism as it actually exists functions more like an inverse meritocracy, a system of social advancement based on the exploitation of the members of society who actually perform the work, and who therefore create all value. As they say, if hard work creates millionaires then every African peasant woman would be worth a fortune. The idea that personal wealth is capitalism's reward for producing economic value for society is an imaginative fairy tale. In fact, great personal wealth is either the reward for being born to wealthy parents, or for being the most single-minded and ruthless acquirers of other people's money, diminishing rather than uplifting the social good in the process. By the same logic those with the smallest incomes must be making the least contribution to society. But even a casual look at the facts shows the opposite is true. Food production is one endeavor no society can do without. But the people who do the work of producing food for consumption - farm-workers, slaughterhouse workers, cannery and processing workers, restaurant workers - mostly receive below average wages.

But the real chasm of inequality isn't between food-industry workers and higher-paid workers of other industries. It's between the productive workers of each industry and the major owners of each industry, the big stockholders who contribute no useful labor to production or distribution. Nor is it a matter of lower-wage workers being more or less important than higher-paid workers. All the necessary jobs have to be done in order for the workplace, the industry, the economy to function. For example, if the doctors in a hospital don't have the combined support of nurses, nursing assistants, various specialized technicians, clerical staff and custodial workers, they can't practice their advanced skills in healing patients. Take any group out of the mix and the hospital couldn't function. On the other hand, remove the hospital managers and medical insurance CEOs from the mix and the healthcare system would function much better! Administered instead as a democratic workplace community, with decisions made in an associated manner by all the workers of the workplace, what should be the top priority of a healthcare institution - patient care - would be the top priority.

Under capitalism those who do all the work are only allowed access to the workplaces and the chance to earn a living on condition that they fork over most of the value they add during the production process to the people who own the workplace. Thus, a person who adds $30 each hour to the product or service he or she works on may only be paid $10 for each hour she works. The rest goes to capital: the owner of the workplace, his banker, insurance company, marketing consultant, etc. To maintain this state of affairs the capitalist class uses its great wealth to control the electoral process and screens out any political candidates who might interfere too much with the very undemocratic running of the nation's workplaces. Whatever the political government does, it is forbidden to really interfere in the economic relationship between workers and owners, or to do anything, however sorely needed by the vast majority of the population, against the basic interests of the owning capitalists.

Defenders of capitalism are left to their fallback position: "Any other system just wouldn't work because people are different and you can't make them equal."

First, this confuses two separate concepts: difference and equality.

Equality in its social sense does not mean sameness. Obviously, people are not the same. Whether by nature or nurture, or probably a combination of both, people have different potentials for different areas of physical and intellectual activity. Changing the economic system won't change that. What it will do is insure that every individual has the opportunity to develop whatever potential talents and capabilities they do have. As it is today, despite all the blather about "you can be whatever you choose to be," most people fall into a career out of economic necessity rather than choice, and then get stuck there out of continuing economic necessity. Capitalism in reality blunts individuality rather than promotes it. Workers have to mold themselves to the needs of the system, which are determined by what is profitable in the marketplace, rather than themselves determining what their own needs are and how best to satisfy them. Equality means having the equal opportunity to develop your own abilities, without having the "right" to advance at the expense of others. It means having the equal opportunity to influence the decisions and outcomes of the economy and society, the equality in government that can come about only in a democratically-controlled economic system.

But today, as a result of economic inequality, government is controlled by an elite of big wealth-holders. Their corruption of politics is now so blatant that hardly anyone else believes their voice counts anymore. And they're right - it doesn't. The liberals and reformers who think they can change this with campaign-finance reform or new voting systems are on a fool's errand. One way or the other big money always finds a way to control government.  Those who seek real democracy must attack the economic inequality that blocks its realisation. The idea of economic equality may seem unrealistic to many people today. The aspirations of the majority for security and well-being, a clean environment and a peaceful world are blocked by the profit interests of a small minority. The only way out of the impasse is to create a new system of production and social administration, one that can direct our resources to meeting human needs and solving human problems.

In socialism, the community collectively are the co-owners of all the workplaces in the economy. All the goods and services created by the people who work belong to those same working people. Socialism cannot be 'given' to the workers by a political or intellectual elite, however sincere it may be. Socialist self-administration can only be built by the informed and united action of the workers themselves.