The Socialist Party is organised to assist the working-class
movement by a dissemination of its literature, to educate into a knowledge of socialist
principles. It affirms its belief that
political and social freedom are not two separate and unrelated ideas, but are
two sides of the one great principle, each being incomplete without the other.
The Socialist Party is organised because we are face to face with conditions
that require united action of our class at the ballot box.
Today’s society rests on ownership of the land and the
machinery of production. The owners of most of the land and the tools of
production constitute what is the capitalist class. Ownership divides society
into two distinct classes. One is the class of employers, and the other is the
class of wage-workers (the working class). The working class, by their labour,
produce the wealth that sustains society, they lack economic and industrial
security, suffer from over-work, enforced unemployment, and their attendant
miseries, all of which are due to the present capitalist form of society. The
capitalist class, through the ownership of most of the land and the tools of
production — which are necessary for the production of food, clothing, shelter
and fuel — hold the working class in complete economic and industrial
subjection, and thus live on the labour of the working class. Workers, who do
all the useful work of society, in order to secure food, clothing, shelter and
fuel, must sell their labour-power to the employers who are the exploiters and live on the wealth
produced by the working class.
The interest of the working class is diametrically opposed
to the interest of the capitalists. The capitalist class — owning as they do,
most of the land and the tools of production — employ the workers, buy their
labour-power, and return to them in the form of wages, only part of the wealth
they have produced. The rest of the wealth produced by the worker the employers
keep; it constitutes their profit — i.e., rent, interest, and dividends. Thus
the working class produce their own wages as well as the profits of the
capitalists. In other words, the working class work a part only of each day to
produce their wages, and the rest of the day to produce surplus (profits) for
the owning capitalist class. The interest of the employing class is to get all
the surplus (profits) possible out of the work of the working class. The
interest of employees is to get the full product of their labour. Hence there
is a struggle between these two classes. This struggle is called the “class struggle.”
It is a struggle between the owning class — which must continue to exploit the workers
in order to live — and the non-owning working Class, who, in order to live must
work for the owners of the land and the tools of production.
The ruling class control the State and govern the working
class not for the well-being of the workers but for the well-being and profit
of the capitalists. It is only by using their political power that the capitalists
make their exploitation of the working class legal and the oppression of their
system constitutional. And it is only by using their political power that the
working class can make their own exploitation illegal and their own oppression
unconstitutional. It is only by the use of their political power that the workers
can abolish capitalist rule and privilege, and establish a social system based
on the common ownership of all the land and the tools of production, to be the
share of all. In a socialist society, the only people who live on the work of
others, and who have the right to be dependent upon their fellows, are small
children, people who are too old to support themselves, the sick and disabled. To
win economic freedom the non-owning working class must force this struggle into
the political field and use their political power (the ballot) to abolish
capitalist class ownership, and thus revolutionise in the interests of themselves
the entire structure of society.
To the workers belongs the future. We ask fellow workers to
organise with 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 person shall have the
free exercise and full benefit of his or her faculties, multiplied by all the
modern factors of civilisation.
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