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What do the workers of Scotland gain when power passes from the bankers and manufacturers of the City of London to Charlotte Square of Edinburgh? Real life to-day gives the answer: the lust for profit has led capitalism into an unparalleled economic crisis, millions of workers have been thrown on the streets to starve, while the capitalists, exploiting the defencelessness of working folk, are cutting the wages of those still in employment. People must know their history and their future. They remain ignorant of the truth because the truth would damage and be dangerous to the landowners, industrialists and financiers.
We, in the Socialist Party, firmly and permanently established the simple, clear truth: the life of the working people of town and village, cannot be changed for the better while the conditions exist which make it possible for one man to live on the labour of tens and hundreds and thousands of people. The brutal forms of social life which are built on greed, envy, incessant strife, and which senselessly exhaust the labour energy of the working people--these shameful conditions can be changed only by the working class. For this purpose the working class must take over political power; it must take over all the land and everything that it produces and yields when intelligent, planned human labour is applied to it--everything useful to men that is hidden in the bowels of the earth; it must take over all the means of production: technology, factories,transport; it must take over everything that has been made and is being made by the labour of the workers.
The basic cause of capitalist ills are the right to private property, the right to exploit, the right to rob, the right to over-produce and cause crises, the right to compete, and cause wars. Capitalism, with its mass production, its handful of billionaires getting more and more wealth, needs to sell, must sell. to compete with America. To do that, the capitalists must intervene in the affairs of all other countries, to ensure that their policies are adapted to Wall Street’s and City of London’s interests. The recurring crises seek to force the workers on to the defensive, to bring about wage cutting and worsening conditions, while it becomes more and more difficult for the little people to make ends meet. Is it surprising that workers can see no difference between the leaders of capitalism, irrespective of their political affiliations. Workers know that they are exploited.
And the basic answer? Common ownership of the means of production, so that all may enjoy the fruit of their labour, and consume it, thus eliminating the economic crises and military conflict. It is the socialist answer. Socialists are not out to create a blood-soaked revolution. Socialists work for the improvement of the conditions of the people. Our direction of building up a class-conscious working-class Socialist Party is that we agitate, educate and organise! Workers’ understanding of social science teaches them that in the long run, such is capitalist development, that improvement can only be attained by changing basic social relations, by a shift in ownership and control from the few to the many, all-embracing socialisation when the whole of society is changed by the elimination of the private ownership of the entire means of production. Any violence accompanying the change will be determined not by us, who hate it, and want it not, but by the possible resistance by the few to the will of the people for it. John F. Kennedy said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
The development to socialism is also inevitable – what is in question is how much more of the ills caused by capitalism, from wage servitude to war, we have to go through, and that depends upon all of us, upon you. A few owners rule the vast numbers of dispossessed without hope under capitalism. The future, however, is full of hope but only with socialism. It is necessary to end the very system under which a tiny number of men exercise domination over the lives of the people, to end the exploitation of human labour. It is necessary because unless it is done, we face the consequences of returning economic crises, of more war and weare threatened by the global environmental catastrophe.
“We, of the socialist working class realise that as we suffer together, we must work together, that we may enjoy together.”- James Connolly
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