Why the Socialist Party

The aim of the World Socialist Movement is the abolition of class rule and class conflict, with all their detrimental consequences, So long as society is divided into classes, in whatever form, the economics and politics as well as the ideas, culture, etc. of society will be dominated by one class or another–they cannot serve all classes, exploiter and exploited, oppressor and oppressed, master and slave, equally.


Once money becomes the aim of production, labour power has to become a commodity. In other words, a worker’s labour power can be bought and sold. Besides the fact that people must be legally free–that is, not slaves owned by others or serfs tied to the land–the labourer must have lost all means of production and thus all ability to produce either for consumption or exchange for himself. An example of this is peasants being driven off the land. Labour power as a commodity is the necessary complement of the private ownership of the means of production by the capitalists. Only by buying the worker’s labour power can the capitalist make profits. Workers produce more than what the capitalist pays them in wages and benefits. This is the basis of exploitation of the workers. What the workers produce over and beyond the socially necessary labour for keeping themselves and their families alive and working is surplus value. Surplus value is the only source of profits and is ripped off by the capitalists. Inside a socialist society, labour power is no longer a commodity.


To assure plenty, security, leisure, and freedom for all, it is necessary that the existing property system, the existing forms of economic control and distribution of wealth, be so changed as to adapt them to the conditions of modern life. Only by the socialized ownership and democratic control of such productive wealth, doing away with exploitation and making the satisfaction of human wants the ruling motive in production, can the ideal of a classless society be realized. The interest of the wage-working class imperatively demands this change. The choice before us is either to permit the uncontrolled development of capitalism to concentrate all power in the hands of an oligarchy and reduce the people to abject servitude or to assert the right and duty of the people to control and remodel their economic life. Any appeal to revolutionary violence must be repudiated. It is unnecessary and unjustifiable in countries where the orderly and peaceful methods of democracy are available. Our fellow-workers, if they but have confidence in themselves, to transform our society of non-producing owners and non-possessing workers into a socialist democracy in which all shall be all joint-owners (or non-owners) for the common good. Thus and only thus can class rule, with its attendant evils of social strife and international war, of undeserved poverty, of corruption and servility, be transformed into a truly free and democratic society, in which useful work performed by all through far shorter hours and under far more pleasant conditions than now generally prevail, will be able to produce the material basis of a livelihood for all far better than is enjoyed today by any except the very rich.


The Socialist Party takes the political field with one plank upon its programme—Socialism. It emphasises that only socialists must vote for its candidates. Every other vote is useless and dangerous. Alliances, compromises, and arrangements with other parties may easily mean the return of a candidate, but not of a socialist candidate. We do not consider that the strength of any party in the labour movement is determined by the number of individuals which compose it.  The class struggle reflects itself in the domain of ideas. In the name of freedom, in the name of honesty, in the name of civilisation itself, for the good of those now alive and of generations yet unborn, the Socialist Party call upon our fellow- workers of the city and country as a class to join us in winning the good new world which is within our reach.