Sunday, February 15, 2015

Your World, Our World, One World


“Arouse, ye slaves! Declare war, not on the capitalist, but on the capitalist system”Eugene Debs

Many sneer at socialism as unattainable. But we in the Socialist Party maintain socialism is practical. Is it necessary to prove that socialism is not dead? We need only see what is going on all over the world today. Socialist ideas are everywhere. Socialism is not an academic and Utopian conception, it is ripening and developing in closest touch with reality.

The objective of socialism is a free individual in a free society, the well-being of each assured by the well-being of all. Socialism is that social system under which the necessaries of production are owned, controlled, and administered by the people, for the people. Class rule is at an end. Socialism is rule by the working people. They will decide how socialism is to work. To use the word “socialism” for anything but working people’s power is to misuse the term. Nationalisation of mines, railways, steel, etc. is not socialism, nor does this constitutes “the socialist sector of a mixed economy”. Nationalisation is state capitalism, with no relation to socialism. Nor is the “welfare state” socialist. Many good men and women have viewed the sufferings of the working class and have attempted to make reforms which would ease the misery of the masses. But these reforms have inevitably failed, not because the intentions of those who proposed them were not good, but because they did not fit in with the force dominant in social and industrial life –capitalism.  Socialism will certainly give high priority to health, education, art, science, and the social well-being of all its members. That is why it exists, that is the purpose of its economy. But “welfare” in a capitalist state, to improve the efficiency of that state as a profit-maker, is not socialism but another form of state capitalism. It can be an improvement on capitalism with no welfare, just as a 40-hour week is an improvement on a 60-hour week. But it is not socialism. Socialism is the society of the free and equal. It is simply a question of capitalism or socialism, of despotism or democracy?

Socialism is the only remedy. Its philosophy of cooperation is rational, humane, and all-embracing. The trend is toward the cooperative commonwealth. It is the hope of the world. Capitalism is the breeder of selfishness and greed. Capitalism has spawned a brood of vices.  In the wage system you and your children, and your children’s children, if capitalism should prevail, are condemned to slavery and there is no possible hope unless by throwing over the capitalist and voting for socialism. What you must do is to organise your class and assert your class interests just as the capitalists do to rob you. What we want is not to reform the capitalist system. We want to get rid of it. What is wanted is not a reform of the capitalist system, but its entire abolition. Socialism is not a reform, it is a revolution. The working class must get rid of the whole brood of masters and exploiters, and put themselves in possession and control of the means of production. As soon as capital shall cease to govern, wage-labour and the rest of slavery will be abolished. Freedom and equality will then be no longer empty and cheap phrases, but will have a real meaning; when all people are really free and equal they will honour and advance one another. It is therefore a question not of “reform,’ the mask of fraud, but of revolution. The capitalist system must be overthrown, class-rule abolished and wage-slavery supplanted by the cooperative commonwealth.

We are educating, we are agitating, we are organising. If all the working class were to use their eyes to see; their ears to hear; their brains to think, how soon this Earth would be transformed. No sane person could be satisfied with the present system. Socialism struggles for the emancipation of all in every stratum of society, fighting against all exploitations and all oppressions. It is the defender of all the exploited and all the oppressed. To let the working class speak clearly is the mission of the socialist movement of the world

 “The rich man is he who, being young, has the rights of old age; being old, the lucky chances of youth; vicious, the respect of good people; a coward, the command of the stout-hearted; doing nothing, the fruits of labour.” - Victor Hugo


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