We are THE Socialist Party

A function of the Socialist Party is to ensure that our fellow workers are educated into realising that their industrial power must back up a political or general class fight. This struggle can only be accomplished by the working class through their own influence and sticking to uncompromising socialist principles. We cannot expect results unless the masses understand and organise. We have to overcome the power of the state, which is an instrument of capital against labour. This should be done by criticising and exposing the real character of the state.  The Socialist Party seeks to organise all workers into one great PARTY OF LABOUR. Our method is of political organisation at the ballot box to secure the election of representatives of the Socialist Party to all the elective governing public bodies and thus transfer the political power of the State into the hands of those who will use it to further and extend the principle of common ownership.  We, therefore, appeal to all workers to throw in their lot with the Socialist Party and assist it in the gathering the working class to achieve its great object – the common ownership of the means of producing and distributing all wealth.

For the working class of the world, the lesson is plain. Socialism is the overthrow of the capitalist system, and the establishing in its place of a co-operative commonwealth. Our goal of social revolution is the abolition of capitalist private property, the abolition of all exploitation of man by man, the common ownership of the means of production and their planned use for the benefit of the whole of society. The Socialist Party does not put forward this goal as a mere utopia but as a goal the practical attainment of which is made necessary by the actual conditions of modern society. Socialism is not inevitable. What has been termed its ‘inevitability’ consists in this, that only through socialism can human progress continue? But there is not and cannot be any absolute deterministic inevitability in human affairs since man makes his own history and chooses what to do. What is determined is not his choice, but the conditions under which it is made, and the consequences when it is made. The meaning of scientific socialism is not that it tells us that socialism will come regardless, but that it explains to us where we stand, what course lies open to us, what is the road to choose. Not one who really believes in socialism can afford to come to terms, in any shape or form, on vital principles with the class enemy. We do not ally ourselves with those who shy away at the very notion of the co-operative commonwealth being established in his or her day, and who rather propose that socialism can only be an ultimate aim where  everything will go on just as it is in your life-time, my life-time, and the life-time of your children; but sometime in the dim and distant future, perhaps in our grandchildren’s grandchildren life-time when it does not very much matter, socialism may come about. The Socialist Party is dedicated to the revolutionary socialist principles and to the struggle for socialist freedom in the here and now.

Are the Socialist principles and its fundamental ideas unsound? If so, we have been on the wrong track all the time. The Socialist Party is founded on three cardinal principles:

1. that society is divided into classes with conflicting economic interest;

2. that economic considerations is the mainspring of human action;

3. that surplus values are wrested from the working class through the private ownership.

Socialism can scarcely be better expressed than by Marx and Engels that the basis of the new society will be the administration of things, as opposed to the existing order which consists in the coercion and exploitation of persons. Socialism means the freeing of the individual from the fetters which weigh upon ourselves under the capitalistic system. And this is not to be understood as meaning that while the old fetters are removed new chains will be riveted. All direct coercion of the individual, as such, is contrary to the principles of socialism. Coercion will be the task of socialism to get rid of, if not immediately, as effectively and speedily as possible. One of the aims of the industrial and political organisation supposed by socialism is the guaranteeing of the freedom of the individual for good or ill. Socialism comes not to destroy individual freedom, but to fulfil it.

The Socialist Party, part of the World Socialist Movement to establish a new society appeals to you to join it and engage in the noble fight for working-class emancipation and socialism. We have the right to call upon you to enter our Party, for we have never flinched from the struggle against capitalism and never forsaken the principles of socialism. Given favourable conditions our activities will spread to where we live and work, awakening the consciousness and stimulating the militancy of fellow workers, winning them over to the banner of the party of the socialist revolution, the Socialist Party.