The Socialist Party primarily concern itself with pointing out the defects of present-day society and advocating the replacing of the capitalist system by the common ownership and democratic administration of the means of production and distribution. The success of the socialist movement and the rapidity of its progress will depend very largely upon the method of education and the political tactics of the Socialist Party to bring about the cooperative commonwealth. The political policy of the Socialist Party is essentially constructive. There is no place in the socialist movement for the insurrectionists or the opportunists who seize upon the trade union movement not because it is an economic tool to maintain for the workers a higher standard of existence than that which they would enjoy if they were completely disorganised but as an economic weapon to replace political action. Socialism does not advance necessarily in response to or because of great industrial distress. These crises may point out the fact that something is wrong, but the suggestion of the remedy and the cure for these ills is quite a different problem. There is no ground for neither the conservative timidity of the reformists or the fetish-worshipping anti-parliamentarian.
We are living in a time when the comforts of life, and all the material wealth needed to bring happiness to every human being, can be produced in abundance. There is no need whatever for one human being to go hungry or homeless. Mankind’s inventive genius has developed the technology that abundance is possible to all. But between that abundance and its enjoyment, an obstacle has been placed. That obstacle is capitalism and its defenders and beneficiaries, the capitalist class. , Instead of fighting the capitalist for wealth and freedom, or fellow-workers fall upon each other, and the stakes in that internecine conflict are death to the loser; poverty, misery, and wage-slavery to the winner, this fight between fellow-workers. For the Socialist Party, the work, then, is of organising and educating fellow-workers, to fight for wealth and freedom, and not for poverty and slavery; to fight their masters and not their fellow-slaves, to fill in their hearts the desire to forever end a system and a class responsible for social savagery.
The Socialist Party's mission is so to organise production so that wealth can be so abundantly produced as to free mankind from want and the fear of want, from the necessity of a life of arduous toil in the production of the mere necessaries of life. The Socialist Party is a class party. It frankly admits that a political organisation is but an expression of class interest. The party, therefore, exists for the sole purpose of representing the interests of the producers, that is to say, the working class. The Socialist Party did not create class lines or class distinctions. The economic interests of the capitalist class dominate our entire social system; the lives of the working class are recklessly sacrificed for profit, wars are fomented between nations, indiscriminate slaughter is encouraged, and the destruction of whole races is sanctioned in order that the capitalists may extend their commercial dominion abroad and enhance their supremacy at home. The workers can most effectively act as a class in their struggle against the powers of capitalism by constituting themselves into a political party, distinct from and opposed to all parties formed by the propertied class in that we call for the establishment of the cooperative commonwealth and we warn the people against the “public” ownership demands made by capitalistic political parties, which always result in perpetuating the capitalist system. The State, in the hands of the capitalists is an instrument by which the capitalist class seeks to repress and suppress civil and political rights of the working class The Socialist Part call the attention of our fellow-workers to the fact that our government is but a servile tool in the hands of the capitalist class and hostile to the interests of labour, and we call upon the working class to use the ballot in defence of their own interests by voting for the Socialist Party. We call the attention of or fellow-workers to the fact that the class struggle so nobly waged by the trade union forces today, while it may result in lessening the exploitation of labour, can never abolish that exploitation. The exploitation of labour will only come to an end when society takes possession of all the means of production for the benefit of all the people. It is the duty of every worker to realise the necessity of independent political action on socialist lines, to join the Socialist Party and assist in building upon a strong political movement of the wage-workers with the aim and to abolish wage-slavery and the establishment of a cooperative system of society, based on the common ownership of all the means of production and distribution.
What is labour? Labour is that element in capitalist society that produces all wealth. Labour, accordingly, is the element that feeds both itself and the capitalist class. We suffer the pangs and outrages of capitalism rather than removing the system of wage exploitation upon which it is based. The only cure is to eradicate the cause of the evil by making the machinery of production common property, so that it may serve as a blessing, instead of a means of competitive destruction and thieving profit to private individuals, as at present.
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