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Tuesday, October 04, 2016

It’s share or die.


The sole aim of the Socialist Party is to establish socialism and abolish the right of one man to rob another of the fruits of his or her labour. This is what makes our Party different from all others. No-where in the world has socialism ever been established despite claims to the contrary. Our policy is for the people to taking the affairs of their world into their own hands, where the bankers, landlords, and profiteers no longer exist. Common ownership prevails. As a result, freed from all capitalist restrictions, there is rapid and continuous economic development with living standards and quality of life rises. Science and culture advance. Such a social system alone is the guarantee that robotics and automation can really flourish, serving the people, not the profiteer. We know we are asking a lot from our fellow-workers in organising a movement for socialism. Fellow-workers must start to find the true path to their emancipation. The independent interests of the working class must be kept to the forefront – the abolition of capitalism and the establishment of socialism. Ours is a great aim to make the working class the masters of their own destiny, to win political power, and establish socialism. Supposing, though, that the working class does not succeed in destroying the capitalist social order of misery and war, what then? A future of constant poverty, permanent exploitation and perpetual war? We cannot believe that our fellow-workers will long suffer existing conditions of misery. We are confident that before long they will grow aware of their degradation and seek to break once and for all the chains of exploitation and establish the true free society of socialism. For those who point to the pervading presence of xenophobic nationalism and theocratic fundamentalism, we say a practical demonstration of socialism would dispel such darkness. Men and women must exert their conscious influence and action.

Many media pundits declare nationalism has triumphed over socialism. They rightly recognise that nationalism and socialism are antagonistic ideologies. The Socialist Party accept that national and class divisions will persist for a long time. We possess no doubt about the outcome: The revolutionary process will inevitably abolish both class and national divisions. World socialism will triumph. Nationalism helps bind the working class to the ruling class of its nation. Socialism unites the working people of the world against the global capitalist class. The international working class will determine its own destiny and as long as the working class holds nationalist ideas, it is allowing its destiny to be determined by the bosses and politicians. Class unity must be established between the oppressed and exploited regardless of nationality and race. That is basically the same point that Marx made when he said, “labour in the white skin can not be free as long as labor in the black skin is branded.” And in referring to the need to overcome the hostile attitude of the English worker towards the Irish workers, Marx wrote: “He...turns himself into a tool of the aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself.” Socialists do not fan the flames of nationalism nor stoke the hatred of racism that further divides the working class.

The main difference between us in the Socialist Party and the average political activist is that we understand the identity of our aims while they do not as yet. The main tenets of socialism are, our people are divided into different classes by their economic position. There is first the possessing or capitalist class. That class as a class does not live by work but by income in the shape of rent, profit or interest. It owns the land upon which we all must live with all the natural wealth under the surface and above it. It owns the means of transportation and communication, and all the modern machinery and technology and instruments of work, the factories and farms, the offices, mines and  mills.
Then there is the working class, a class of persons who by their daily toil create and augment the wealth of the rich but barely manage to sustain themselves alive. They cannot work without the use of the modern machinery of wealth production. They must sell their labour-power to the owners of this machinery. The industries are operated for the private profits of the capitalists. Hence every capitalist concern seeks to retain the largest possible share of its income for its owners and stockholders and to pay as little as possible to the workers as wages. The industries of the world are the personal property of the capitalists and are conducted by them without responsibility or accountability to the people. When it pays them they keep “their” business going, when it does not pay them they stop operations and deprive millions of workers of their jobs and bread. Between these two classes, there is war. By “class war” we do not necessarily mean open and physical conflict, but a constant and acute antagonism of interests which mostly smolders under the surface and sometimes erupts into violent hostilities. This class war can only end with the end of economic classes and class divisions, and that is what socialism seeks to accomplish.

The Socialist Party proposes a complete and radical reorganisation of our whole industrial system. Concretely we demand that all basic industries be taken out of private hands and be transformed into common ownership operated by appropriate the democratically appointed public agencies for the benefit of the people. That implies planned production for use with the total elimination of private profit and exploitation. The Socialist Party do not expect or desire a sudden, cataclysmic change by insurrection but a rapid, transformation. The hope of the Socialist Party lies in the organization by the workers of a political party of their own, challenging the power of the old capitalist parties and electing their own delegates to legislative and administrative bodies in numbers strong enough to capture the machinery of government. That is why the Socialist Party stands for independent working class political action; that is why it is a Socialist Party. The socialist movement is a labour movement, a political labour movement. It cannot exist as anything else. If the socialist movement is weak it simply indicates that the labour movement has not yet developed sufficient political consciousness to realise that it should support its own class in politics as well as in the economic field. If the workers were organised politically and selected their own delegates they could have a working class majority.

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