the strength of the socialist argument isn’t going to come from proving the disequilibrium between the amount of work performed by the capitalist and the proletariat. if the socialist tried that crude approach, he’d get caught up in quibbling over what is defined as ‘more important’ work and would gain no leverage by drawing attention only to the amount of labor performed. a brick mason will burn more calories in thirty minutes than a brain surgeon will burn in a whole day, but this can’t mean that the brick mason is more important. so that approach cannot work.
look at the situation in another way. if the real value of a series of work efforts - planning material deliveries, negotiating with distributors and vendors to sell your product, scheduling factory maintenance, organizing workers and stations, managing payroll, dealing with accountants, etc., etc. - were worth precisely what the market dictated, then the company owner would be worth the same amount as a worker who performed the same tasks. so if stacey lou is making salary or wage x for tasks y (doing all of the above), then so should the company owner who’s doing the same thing. rather the company owner tells himself that when he does it, it’s somehow magically ‘worth more’ than when stacey lou does it.
to get around this pretentious nonsense, you’d deprivatize the company, set up democratic worker managements who would then collectively determine the value of doing these tasks and assign the appropriate salary/wage to that job. and the same factors that determine the value of work/product in a free, competitive market, would still exist in such a setting. say product x isn’t very popular among consumers and sales are low. workers in the factory that manufactures product x will either have to accept that the collective decision was made to pay wage x for the task they perform (an adjustment made because profits are dropping), or request/search for another job at which they can make more. the same forces of demand are here controlling (competitively) the process… only nobody is making money off someone else’s labor and everybody is working.
socialism does not seek to abolish private property, but private business. for an economic system to work, people have to be able to freely choose what material commodities they value, what they buy, since this is the very thing that stimulates material production. the consumer’s values dictate the worth of everything; the products and the value of the labor required to produce them. a communist dictator can’t just demand ‘this is the value of x’ and set a flat price for it. that’s not how it works. the market must be allowed to self-regulate, with the same element of competition to increase one’s marketable skills and/or produce a popular commodity. there is no loss of ‘incentive’ to work here, as we hear in that tired old argument conservatives are always waving around.
but there’s more. much more. you also have to imagine a future in which far less work has to be done by human beings, for two reasons; EVERYBODY is working (instead of just a majority with the exclusion of capitalists and the lumpen proletariat), and machines have become able to provide alternative forms of labor. and this with the same, if not more, quantity of production. imagine that; working less but producing more.
here’s a basic outline for such a plan: anti-dialectics.co.uk/AAA_Socialist_Economy.htm