The profit system is designed to benefit a few and to the detriment of the many. Our current capitalist system is incapable of addressing the problems within society because inequality and poverty are embedded within its very foundation. People are relegated to the realm of property, to be turned into commodities, to be bought and sold on the market like any other product rather than recognizing us as deserving individuals. Humans are altruistic and communal, full of empathy, yet capitalism teaches us that the world is a self-serving racket and that we should reject our strong tendencies toward cooperation, mutual aid, and solidarity. The self-destructive behaviour of the capitalist few overwhelms the cooperative behaviour of the many. One of the tasks of the Socialist Party is to expose the false idea with what the science tells us about who we really are. We do not try to change human nature, we only require to reveal it. Our species has arrived a point in its social evolution where it could use our collective mental and collaborative capabilities to ensure that all its members get everything they need to survive and thrive without upsetting the delicate ecosystem. Right now we have the ability to come together and cooperate to eliminate all of humanity’s problems and create planetary harmony. We have approached a cross-roads in civilisations progress. It is to take the dead-end of no-change or choose change and take the road towards socialism, an achievable destination if we want it and it will be right there if we truly head towards it, and preparing for the journey is one of the most important things that an individual can do to help bring it about.
We, WORKERS, have been rendered all but voiceless. We are bereft of the knowledge necessary for our liberation an emancipation. In preventing fellow workers from gaining an awareness of its exploitation, the boss-class invest much time, energy, and resources into rigging the game, from the political structure to mass media. Ignorance is the brick and mortar of the capitalist system. Its foundation is one of lies and deception, veiling the truth and disguising the reality. Capitalist propaganda offers up a mirage of a docile mass. Too many of the working class have been fooled and bullied into believing that we have no voice.
The Socialist Party was formed to do educational spade work in the matter of socialism. We are frankly, an intransigent body, which believes firmly in socialism as the only possible way to economic salvation. Rejecting all compromise, viewing all “palliative" mongering with distrust and suspicion, the Socialist Party is determined to make the goal of social revolution by ever insisting on what is becoming more and more patent to thinking people, that “who would be free, must strike the blow.” The initial step is to bring home to fellow-workers they must recognise their bondage. You lack the good things in life in spite of your labour, Your masters enjoy luxury in spite of their idleness.
It is our view that it is possible for the working class to use these institutions to settle their class struggle with the owning class. The vote is thus a potential class weapon. But the vote, like other weapons, can be used properly or improperly. Because at present the workers use it to elect demagogues and careerists of one kind or another is no argument against its potentialities. As far as we are concerned, what is important is not so much the vote as the understanding behind it. Thus, when we contest elections we do all we can to make sure that only convinced socialists vote for us. A vote won on other grounds is worse than useless as the history has shown. The vote is just a possible means to political power—the goal of a class-conscious working class. Clearly then our conception of political action differs from that of other parties and the reformists in particular. They perform any tricks and engage in all kinds of demagogy in order to get elected. Without a socialist working class behind them, what can they do? Nothing save maintain the status quo. Hence the phenomena of "sell-out” and “betrayal.” It is completely irrelevant to judge the usefulness of political action on how the reformists have used it, not least because they operate on a different assumption, namely, that you can substantially improve the lot of the working class without socialist understanding. When delegates of the Socialist Party are sent to the centre of political power they will be the delegates of the working class because the Socialist Party will be the working class organised consciously and politically. The point is that we are not a political party in the conventional sense of the term, we are not a group of politicians trying to get elected to do something for the working class, to pass a socialism in Great Britain Act and legislate the new society into being. Far from it, in our view, a socialist party should not be a vanguard but an instrument. We conceive ourselves as an instrument which the working class can use to achieve political power, a necessary prerequisite for the establishment of socialism.
By means of the vote, workers have it in their power to capture Parliament with a socialist majority, and end once and for all the system which subjects and degrades them. Parliament is the place where power resides, where the state machine and its coercive forces are controlled, and the laws passed which are aimed at the smooth running of capitalism’s everyday affairs. Although there may be a lot of hot air there at times, Parliament is no mere talking shop producing vacuous hot air. It is a power station, the more so because those who go there are sent by the majority of the population—the working class. Is it any wonder then, that the parties of capitalism are so full of promises? They at least know how important the vote is to their interests; what a pity the same cannot be said of the workers. In their ignorance and confusion about the world in which they live, they switch their support from one party to the other, in the pathetic belief that they are fundamentally different from each other and that one will succeed in solving their problems where its predecessor has failed. And this is no mere trial and error process, but the persistent mental floundering of the working class, persistent that is, until they learn about Socialism. That is why, despite the black record of the parties in Parliament today, the political swings from one side to the other, and whoever is out, capitalism is always in.
The vote is a very powerful weapon. Used for the correct purposes, it could gain political power for a majority of class-conscious workers to establish a world of common ownership and democratic control. But that would be an action based on mass knowledge and understanding of Socialist principles, and unfortunately, it looks as if the workers have a lot to learn before that happy day. The very existence of the Labour and Tory parties is proof of it.
We are Marxists, basing our position on the investigations and conclusions of Marx. Our sole object is the achievement of socialism—a social system in which everything that is in or on the earth will be the common possession of all mankind. Everyone will be on an equal footing. There will be no frontiers, no buying and selling, and no privileged groups—except the old, the young, and the infirm. We hold that capitalism, the system under which goods are produced by the workers for the profit of a relatively small section of owners of the means of production, is now the system that prevails all over the earth; that it breeds wars, slumps, internecine conflicts, and misery for the mass of the people; that there is a constant class struggle going on between the owners of the means of production, and those that operate them—the working class; that all the reforms put forward and fought for by well-meaning people have not touched the fringe of the problem of working-class subjection but, instead, though even unintentionally, have pushed further away the day of emancipation; that, so long as the present system prevails there is no remedy for this state of affairs; the only way out is to abolish capitalism and establish socialism in its place; that state-ownership is not socialism, but a particular form of capitalism; that the workers must organise together internationally to attain their freedom from the conditions that oppress and frustrate them.
No cessation! No compromising! No concession! No suspension of hostilities! Let the class war continue until we prevail.
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