Agitate! Educate! Organise!

What are we out for? Nothing less than a social revolution, a complete transformation of human society.  That is no little thing. It is about the biggest job that anybody have ever set their minds to. And what are our means - people like ourselves. The emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working-class themselves. There is no other way. It is in that of building up a class-conscious Socialist Party that we bend our efforts towards. Agitate! Educate! Organise! Are we, as is sometimes alleged, too purist, too sectarian or too intolerant? Are we too antagonistic, not to enemies, but to would-be comrades? Do we seek to distance people rather than to win them over? These are searching questions to which it may be worthwhile to give some consideration. In things doubtful, liberty of thought; in things essential, unity; and in all things, charity. Our task is to disarm hostility and to bring together all potential comrades into a united harmonious Socialist Party.

Capitalism is where the people are herded into factories and offices to get the wherewithal to live, while the product of their labour is appropriated by the industrial barons and the lords of capital who possess the right to exploit, the right to rob, the right to over-produce and cause crises, the right to compete, and cause wars. This is the cause of all social ills, and the answer is the abolition of private property, and instead the common ownership of the means of production, so that all may enjoy the fruit of their labour. We want to see society changed. We want to see it transformed from a thing of wars and recessions, to a real brotherhood of man. Sociaists work for the improvement of the conditions of the people. Our understanding of society and history teaches us that improvement can only be attained by changing basic social relations, by a shift in ownership and control from the few to the many, an all-embracing socialization of the means of production and distribution.

Capitalism having enormously developed the productive processes on a social basis, has reached the stage when, because of the private ownership of those processes, the system has become a fetter on production itself. The day has passed for patching up the capitalist system; it must go. Because only a small section of the population controls production and is not answerable to the rest of the community and because this section is competing within its own ranks and with similar classes abroad, it means either the excruciating suffering of repeated slumps or the ultimate threat of total annihilation for the whole world. Our answer to this threat of total annihilation is socialism. Substituting a programme of reforms within capitalist society for the abolition of capitalism and the establishment of socialism is surrender and political suicide. This is betrayal of the socialist objective harking back to the Second International. Reformists put forward utopian demands for the reconstruction of the capitalist economic system in order that the replacement of the capitalist mode of production will be unnecessary and capitalist society itself can be saved. Socialism does not involve re-distribution and any sharing out of the means of production and exchange. It is the socialisation of the whole economy. Today we face the choice between “a revolutionary reconstitution of society” or “the common ruin of the contending classes.”

The essence of the capitalist system is the ownership and control of the materials and tools of production and distribution by a small class whose legal title to the lands, forests, mines, railroads, quarries, mills, factories, and other industrial and commercial utilities and plants gives them control over the lives of the working masses. The workers subsist in a new form of slavery, wherein labor power is paid for by wages, and the bare chance to live depends upon employment by some capitalist master. Employment depends upon the production by the worker of a margin of value over and above what he receives for his labour power. The capitalist master has no liability on account of the wage-worker, except that of payment for labour-power on a time or piece basis. Capitalism has nothing to offer the large majority but uncertainty for tomorrow, unemployment, environmental disasters, poverty and war.

Capitalism knows no national boundaries and encompasses all the world’s countries and peoples. The ruling class of the different states fight for control and hegemony to exploit countries, people and resources all over the globe. The struggle of the working class is also international, even if the working class of each country first must do away with their own bourgeoisie. The working class is the only revolutionary class under capitalism. It is the historical task of the working class to put an end to capitalist exploitation and oppression.

Capitalism inevitably produces exploitation and poverty, war, poisonous environmental pollution, and waste of human and natural resources, none of which can be consistently eliminated without the socialist transformation of society. Like all the other political parties which exist the Socialist Party is the political party of a definite class. It is the political party of the working class and works in its interests as opposed to others which are parties of the rich and which work for the continuation of capitalist exploitation and wage-slavery. The goal is to overthrow the dictatorship of the ruling class and establish socialism, thus ending the exploitation of man by man.