The Socialist Party endeavours to explain to our fellow workers the nature of the struggle in which they are participating. To tell them of the principles for which we work and fight. To reveal what we are confident 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 capitalists 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.
The master class lives upon the labour of the working class, and use all the powers of government, nationally and municipally, in their own interest and against those who labour. The master class, the dominant ruling class, strives by every means in its power to keep the working class in such a state of subjection that the process of spoiling or robbing the worker of his earnings, may go smoothly on with as little risks or dislocation as possible. The working class on the other hand perpetually rises in protest against the incidental details of the robbery, organises to reduce the theft of the masters, and ever casts down its tools, and enters on a bloodless insurrection against the conditions of its servitude. These protests, these organised movements, these unarmed insurrections of labour, these strikes are the inevitable accompaniment of the capitalist system of society – they are the salient proofs that the members of the Socialist Party know what they are talking about when they declare that the normal condition of society is not peace, but war; that the class war is the one, great fact in the modern world. 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 is compelled to work for that section in order to obtain the means of life, there can be no social peace.
The capitalist state has not always existed any more than the capitalist class itself has always existed. Before the advent of capitalist democracy, there was the feudal state of the Middle Ages – the political-armed fist by which the then powerful landowning nobility ruled over and extracted wealth from the toil of the serfs. The young capitalist class undertook the revolutionary overthrow of the feudal state and the establishment of something entirely unknown in that age, namely their own capitalist state. The capitalist classes in the various countries did not – and could not have – accomplished their revolution by themselves. It was the seething discontented masses of serfs, worker, and townspeople who carried the capitalist revolution on their shoulders, fought the tyrants, gave their lives for liberty, equality, fraternity. To the rising capitalists, liberty, equality, fraternity were ideals they wanted for themselves alone. They had no thought to grant the lower classes liberty, equality, and fraternity. To the ruling class, the revolution ushered in a period of capitalist masterly over the subject classes, in place of the rule of the aristocracy.
Rally to the support of the Socialist Party which stands for the interests of the working class, seeking to capture the political power necessary to make the instruments of Labour the property, not of a class, but of a free people in a free social order, the world socialist republic. We appeal to fellow workers to rally around the only banner the red banner of socialism. Cast off all your old political affiliations, and organise and vote to conquer society in the interests of its only useful class – the workers. Let your slogan be, the common ownership of the means of life, your weapon the political organisation of the wage slaves to achieve their own emancipation.
The eyes of the world are upon you, fellow workers. The choice is yours.
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