Hold high the red banner

Fellow-workers, political parties are the expression of economic interests, and in the last analysis are carried to victory or defeat by the development or retardation of economic classes.  It is private property in land and in machinery that creates the division of classes into slave-masters and the enslaved.  To quote the words of Ernest Jones, the Chartist activist:

"The monopoly of land drives him (the worker) from the farm into the factory, and the monopoly of machinery drives him from the factory into the street, and thus crucified between the two thieves of land and capital, the Christ of Labour hangs in silent agony."

We appeal to you then, fellow worker, to rally around the only banner that symbolises hope for you.  Cast off all your old political affiliations, and organise and vote to reconquer society in the interests of its only useful class – the workers. Let your slogan be, the common ownership of the means of life, your weapons the industrial and political organisation to conquer your own emancipation. The Socialist Party remains revolutionary, not in the sense that policemen and politicians understand the word, but in its true historical significance, for it is the conscious expression of the working people’s will, to strive for a radical transformation of society and to enable fellow wage-slaves to substitute socialism for capitalism. The emancipation of the working-class is a historical necessity, and it can only be the work of the workers itself. Wherever folk are drudging under the yoke of capitalism, the organised working men and women will demonstrate for the idea of their social emancipation. This conviction is the keynote of the Socialist Party's message.

Neither regulatory legislation nor the resistance of the trade unions removes the main thing which needs abolishing: capitalist relations, which constantly reproduce the contradiction between the capitalist class and the class of wage labourers. The mass of wage labourers remain condemned to life-long wage labour; the gap between them and the capitalists becomes ever deeper and wider the more modern technology prevails. The reformists would gladly convert wage-slaves into contented wage-slaves, so they must hugely exaggerate the advantageous effects of piecemeal palliatives, etc.  Reforms may sometimes ameliorate the situation of the working class by lightening the weight of the chains labour is burdened with by capitalism, but they are not sufficient to end capitalism and to emancipate the workers from the tyranny of wage-slavery. Fellow members of the working- class declare that they are done for ever with the myth that liberty, or even an effective amelioration of the most cruel evils and sufferings of capitalist exploitation will be granted by the benevolence and justice of the ruling class. Only the action of the working people themselves and organised in a class party for the political struggle, can change wage-slaves into equal citizens of a free commonwealth.

The interests of the workers, as the exploited and oppressed, class of society, are the same in all countries. In consequence our must be an world-wide one. Across the frontiers and seas the workers of all nations reach out to each other the hands for a brotherly union; against the global power of capitalism rises the power of the working class as the workers stand up together in unity to affirm the solidarity of our class interests to show that the capitalist exploitation unites the workers without difference of trade, sex, religion, and nationality, into the one revolutionary force, that is going to conquer the world, where labour has all to win and nothing to lose but its chains.

To the fellow members of the working class, the time has arrived when every man and woman will have to choose whether capitalism with all its attendant miseries and horrors is to remain enthroned, or whether we intend to be free. We shall have to choose whether we really believe in self-emancipation, or whether, for generations yet to come, we prefer to remain the tools of the capitalists, and the slaves of profit. We are confident that socialism is the way out for our class from the horrid nightmare of the competitive struggle which sets nation against nation, class against class, and individual against individual. The struggle between individual capitalists to realise profits sets employer against employer. The conflict between national groups of financiers sets nation against nation, and produces war. But despite their individual and national conflicts the whole capitalist class stands united in their common desire to exploit Labour. Hence under capitalism the freedom of the working class consists in the freedom to starve or accept such conditions as are imposed upon them by the employing class. But the freedom of the master class consists in their untrammelled freedom to buy Labour to create profit. Thus the workers are not free. Neither owning nor controlling the means of life, they are wage slaves of their employers, and are but mere commodities.

In opposition to all other parties—Conservative, Lib-Dem, and Labour— the Socialist Party affirms that so long as one section of the community own and control the means of production, and the rest of the community are compelled to work for that section in order to obtain the means of life, there can be no peace between them. The propertied class controls the State machine, thus our aim demands the capture of the political institutions through the ballot box to afford an opportunity to achieve a peaceful social revolution. Work for the building of the world anew, for the sweeping away of ignorance, for the full physical and mental development of men and women free from class exploitation, and the degradations of poverty. Refuse, and by your neglect you stand for misery, exploitation, greed and war. The eyes of the world are upon you. The choice is yours.