Today we are trapped in the capitalist system with its booms and busts, its recessions and depressions. We need to construct an alternative. That alternative is democratic socialism, a society where people control the political and economic systems for the good of all.
Corporations
The corporations that today dominate our economic, social, cultural and political life have out-lived their usefulness. Just as 150 years ago the slave plantation became an obstacle to our country's development, so today the corporation is the great obstacle that blocks the way to our common prosperity, and like the plantation, it must be abolished. No group of ten or twenty men sitting in a board room should be able to shut down a plant and destroy a community or bankrupt an industry and cripple a state. We as a society must expropriate the corporations and turn them into socially owned, democratically managed enterprises.
Capitalism
The capitalist economy of the United States, dominated by the big banks and multinational corporations, fosters growing disparities between rich and poor, encourages social inequalities such as racism, exploits workers and neglects and abuses the poor. We must create an alternative: a democratic socialist economy where we as people decide our economic priorities and work together provide jobs, health care, education, and a decent life for all.
Socialism
Socialism means the social ownership and control of the nation's large corporations and major industries, a democratically planned economy where the people set the priorities, and where workers and consumers cooperate to realize those goals. Democratic socialism has nothing in common with Soviet-style Communism nor with those Social Democratic parties that merely manage capitalism without transforming it.
