A Rose by any other Name

There is no such thing as politics without projecting ideas about the future. The only difference is that those who predict that things will always remain the same do not know that they are making a prediction. The reformists dream of the establishment of social peace between the classes, between exploited and exploiters, without abolishing exploitation but instead by exercising self-restraint  and by the giving up of all “excessive” and “extreme” demands antagonisms which exist between the worker and capitalist would disappear.  It is impossible for a socialist to share this illusion of the reconciliation of classes. Social harmony shall come about by the ABOLITION of classes. The leading principle of socialism is the overthrow of the capitalist system, and the establishing in its place of a Co-operative Commonwealth.

The words socialist and communist are changing their meaning just as the change in definition of the word christian meant heretics were burned by thousands in the name of the love thy neighbour. Lenin abandoned the word socialism and invented the belief of making socialism mean a “first stage” in the development of communism, thus elaborating the smoke-screen and making it possible to put over in the name of “socialism” the Bolshevik policies of state capitalism.

We wish to make it quite clear as to our exact aim and object. We are socialists, wishful above all things to advance socialism, and by socialism we mean the common or collective ownership of all the wealth production, and this involves the complete ABOLITION of the capitalist system. Socialism means a classless society, and a classless society means that a privileged minority of the population are not in a position to enjoy the national wealth, while the majority live only on their labour to produce it. It means especially that privileged individuals who do have excess income cannot invest it in the instruments of production with which others work, thus reducing them to a position of fixed subservience. It means an end of rent, profit, and interest on stocks and bonds, an end of “surplus value”, an end of the exploitation of labour. This economic change is regarded by socialists as pre-requisite and fundamental.

Being socialists, we are therefore for the labour movement and as trade unionists we value unions very highly, but we should never side with unions who adopted an anti-socialist attitude.  Effective unions will never exist till the workers are revolutionary socialists, just as effective political action can never come till the people are thoroughly class-conscious and are fully determined to stop all robbery by moulding present-day capitalism into the co-operative commonwealth.

One of the early criticisms of syndicalism the Socialist Party had was that it was a continuance of private ownership albeit sectional ownership. The coal mines do not belong to the coal miners merely because they work in them. The road-builders might as well claim the streets if that was the case. It would be of small gain to expropriate the present individual owners of the means of production merely to put them in the hands of other groups of individuals, who would be actuated by the same motive of making the most out of them which was permitted. It is only in the name of and for the benefit of the people as a whole that the present possessors can be rightfully expropriated. This common  ownership of wealth by all people is the economic cornerstone of  the brotherhood of all men. We ask the working class to organise with us to end the domination of private ownership — with its poverty-breeding system of unplanned production — and substitute in its place the Socialist Co-operative Commonwealth in which every worker shall have the free exercise and full benefit of his or her faculties.

 Individual production makes individual ownership necessary. Large-scale production, on the contrary, means co-operation or social production. In mass production the individual does not work alone, but a large number of workers work together to produce a whole. Accordingly, the modern instruments of production are extensive and powerful. It has become wholly impossible that every single worker should own his own instruments of production. Ownership by the workers in common of the instruments of production means a co-operative system of production and the extinction of the exploitation of the workers, who become masters of their own products and who themselves appropriate the surplus of which, under our system, they are deprived by the capitalist. To substitute common, for private, ownership in the means of production, this it is the economic development we are urging.

 If all the machinery and technology at the disposal of mankind  to-day were applied co-operatively to the supply of useful goods and social luxuries, in Robert Owen’s words “wealth might easily be made as plentiful as water.” Non-arduous, enjoyable labour by all members of the community would thus produce plenty for all, and wages and prices would disappear. The object is not the enactment of palliative reforms under capitalism, nor the obtaining of higher wages under existing circumstances, but the immediate establishment of a co-operative commonwealth. That is, in fact, the emancipation of the whole wage-slave class.

When you join the Socialist Party you enjoy the thrill of a new aspiration; you are no longer a blinkered wage-slave. You begin to understand your true and vital relationship to your fellow-workers. You are a person and you have a brain, and if you do not use it in your own interests you are guilty of betraying yourself. When we unite and act together, the world is ours. Together we shall form a world wide Co-operative Commonwealth and when the world-wide co-operative commonwealth having been established, mankind for the first time be ensured the material and mental and moral requisites of a grand and noble existence.  The Co-operative Commonwealth that has been the aim of generations of working-class will attain its full meaning and realisation only with the ending of capitalist rule. The needs of all will be met. It will mean the beginning of  peace and plenty for all the inhabitants of the Earth, the beginning of co-operation between the peoples of the Earth.