The ghost of Highgate cemetery

We know full well the class that is not conscious enough to struggle for its interests is not fit for emancipation. The economic forces at work in society are bringing about conditions that impel the mass of the people to think and to realise that capitalism is bankrupt and unable to function any longer to ensure peace and to guarantee a civilised existence, not to mention survival, for humanity. 

The Socialist Party offers rational answers and a workable solution for the problems besetting our fellow workers. Socialist education is certainly essential and absolutely necessary, but it embraces more than the direct teaching of socialist principles to the individual. This process of awakening to the facts of economic and political life is seemingly imperceptible, but it is cumulative and eventually crystallizes to the point of impelling action.

The Socialist Party stands as the rallying point, and as the guide, pointing the way to ensure the success of the revolution which terminates capitalism and establishes socialism. Our task is to agitate unceasingly and to educate as many of our fellow-workers as possible. The strength of the Socialist Party’s case does not depend solely on the membership of the Socialist Party. Its strength lies primarily in the fact that it is the logical resolution of the class struggle. Its goal, strategy, and tactics are intended for the working class as a whole, not for a revolutionary party alone. One does not become a socialist because socialism comes with an iron-clad guarantee of success. One becomes a socialist because socialism is necessary to attain freedom, security, and well-being for our class; it is necessary if society is to progress rather than revert to barbarism; and, for many members of our class, if not for all humanity, it is necessary for survival. The better organised and better disciplined the working class, the better the chances will be of completing the revolution quickly and with a minimum of disruption -- and the less opportunity any recalcitrant element of the ruling class will have to commit violent or other culpable acts or engage in a “slave-owners rebellion” as Marx puts it.

For decades, belittling, deriding and vilifying by journalistic lick-spittles, ignorant politicians, pompous intellectuals, renegade "Marxists," and a host of others of Karl Marx has been an international "sport." Why do his defamers have this compulsion time and time again to prove him wrong? Why not simply ignore and forget him, if Marx was the failure and fool that they paint him as. His distractors attack him because of fear. Marx's popularity is not due to his alleged personal faults and supposed character flaws. He challenged and exposed the basic cause of the social evils -- the poverty, the misery, the conflicts -- that afflict the class-divided capitalist system. For the ruling-class they recognise the threat of truth. For the working-class they acknowledge a bearer of truth. Marx established conclusively that the capitalist class subsisted and survived by practicing and perpetuating an evil for the exclusive benefit and protection of a privileged class at the expense primarily of the wage workers Hence, the frenzied and repeated efforts to disparage Marx, imputing all sorts of petty and personal motives to him in their hopeless and ever frustrated efforts to 'prove' Marx wrong, to pick flaws in his words and to misrepresent his principles. But all the efforts to demean his work have failed. The spectre from Highgate cemetery continues to haunt the employing owning class. Each day, the soundness of his basic premises, the correctness of his conclusions and the validity of his principles are demonstrated. Under such circumstances, capitalism’s apologists cannot ignore Marx or Marxism and so they constantly train their academic and literary guns against Marxist ideas. But to no avail. Events refute his critics and reconfirm his merits.  Marx and Marxism stand fully vindicated today, having withstood every attack.

Marxian socialism constitutes the hope of the world. The only hope. The important thing to bear in mind is that, powerful as it is, the capitalist propaganda machine is not invincible. The class struggle continues, and the capitalist system continues to generate growing social problems, regardless of whether or not the capitalist media and other institutions choose to acknowledge them. Sooner or later, material conditions will push masses of workers to seek out alternatives to the present social system. That development, combined with the steadfast, energetic educational efforts of socialists, will ultimately permit the truth to prevail.